When Drupal Met Service Excellence
The University of Edinburgh needed a more modern website and new software to manage it. Digital change can cause disruption and speed of delivery can exasperate that. Disruption was not an option.
This session will take the attendees on a journey explaining how the University of Edinburgh underwent a huge digital transformation project to build a new Drupal CMS to run, manage and update the main University website. The future website would be fully responsive, working on all mobile devices. The website hosts over 70,000 published pages managed by a very large devolved community. Over the past year, we have trained over 650 people and expect this pace to continue for another year.
A large organisation-wide change project threatens disruption.
We successfully managed:
- to build a fantastic user friendly CMS that can and will grow with the University’s needs;
- to achieve the migration with minimum disruption and no website downtime;
- to achieve this we used strong leadership, forging long term relationships across the University.
The University setting allows a lot of autonomy and encourages a questioning nature. Some traditional project approaches just won’t work in this setting. As a project team we needed to take on the responsibility of selling Drupal to our end users and to do this we worked hard to engage and empower our community to feel that they owned the our new Drupal CMS along with us. How to balance digital change and business need? We engaged with our community and kept them engaged throughout the project. We used a combination of modern project management techniques including Agile, adapted them to suit our needs to ensure strong leadership and stakeholder engagement.
Our leadership strategy:
- Creating a transparent project vision to communicate the business needs - now and in the future.
- Building a strong project team with defined roles and the authority to make decisions.
- Creating and maintaining relationships by engaging and empowering the wider University community to lead and own their website content.
- Using elements of different project methodologies.
This session is geared towards anyone embarking on the journey towards a Drupal CMS. We will walk attendees through the process from initial discussion about Drupal to the final migrating of content. Attendees will understand how they can take our experience to tackle large organisation-wide projects.
The two presenters fulfilled different roles on the project (Product Owner and Project Manager) with different levels of project experience. This will widen audience interest, as we will be sharing stories of our different approaches, and how we learnt and adopted to the demands of the project.
We will not just be presenting with slides but will also be showing the live CMS software and showing how feedback from our users influenced development decisions improving CMS usability.
PLEASE NOTE That we feel this sesion could also be considered for a Drupal Showcase.