Using a Small Team to Produce 80 Institutionally-Related Sites in a Single Year

The University of Minnesota is switching to Drupal.  The Academic Health Center at the U of MN, which includes all the health related organizations such as the Medical School and associated colleges, is one of the early adopters pioneering the use of the new Drupal platform on campus.  We have over 150 associated web properties to convert in the upcoming 18 months. We're launching 80 Drupal sites this year (20 have been produced by mid-February) and have put together a system for producing a launch rate of 2-3 a week using a small team of 9 people (1 manager, 2 site project leads, 1 developer, 1 designer, 1 admin, and 3 contractors and interns), Many of them share a general institutional theme, but need their own identity within the larger institutional structure of the university.  An example site is: https://adoption.umn.edu/

The talk includes why we moved to Drupal, how Drupal is making a positive impact in the University enviroment -- especially in enabling inter-organizational work, and how our one team smalll team has pioneered fitting into this larger Drupal web ecosystem.  The talk includes information on our general process, strategies, workflow, and the technical components we use to achieve efficiencies in a rapid development process.

This session is given by Patrik Douša,  the developer on this project.