Growing pains: transitioning the Army of Women to modern systems

This is a 90 minute version of the panel. A trimmed down 30 minute version is also submitted here: https://events.drupal.org/seattle2019/sessions/growing-army-women-case-study

The 90 minute version includes discussion on how we handled / planned for / managed massive amounts of complicated historic data, which is not included in the 30 minute version.

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Moving an old, well-established system to current technologies can be a daunting challenge, and not just from an engineering standpoint! Depending on how well established your system, there are also challenges related to content migration, transitioning internal culture, and handholding established users who don’t trust change into the new space.

Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation originally launched Army of Women in 2008 - www.armyofwomen.org - a resource for connecting willing study participants with researchers committed to answering important questions in breast cancer.

In 2016, we upgraded the system to Drupal, employing a combination of workflow and workbench moderation to streamline proper review of all research proposals by a scientific advisory committee before participant recruitment began, along with sophisticated reporting and privacy models to ensure that the proper data are stored, and that personally identifiable information is kept secure.

In October 2018, we launched a mobile application (built with React and using the Drupal site as the data source), aimed at reaching the new generation of mobile-only users and making it even easier for potential participants to be involved.

Through all of this, our organization has had to shift how we work and engage online. Our established users had to learn to trust a new paradigm.

During this session, we will speak to the failures and successes of making this transition. Topics will include:

• If you build it, will they actually come?
  Where we failed in our outreach, and how we successfully turned that failure around.

• Is your organization (and user base) ready for change?
  Where did we flounder as an organization? What was hard for us? How did we make the cultural adjustments needed to come up to the modern tools? How did we help our established users make the transition?

• What about all the historic data?
  Those data are valuable and cannot be lost or broken! How did we make sure we preserved its integrity and maintained its value in our long-term reporting through the migration process, without forcing ourselves to hang on to archaic structures?

• Why is it worth it?
  How did we benefit from this transition? What can we do now that we weren’t able to do before? What can we do next?

Attendees will come away from this case study with open eyes about the challenges of making a real-world transition into current and future technologies with well-established systems. You will have a sense of the risks, and an idea of how to prepare for your own (or your client’s) transition in a manner that will pave the way for success.

And you will also get to see yet another real-world example of Drupal being used to do good, in a manner that takes full advantage of Drupal’s sophisticated entity relationships, workflows, permissions, and even decoupling capabilities.