Just to give a quick run through the areas I plan to cover in this mornings talk. Quick Intro to UCD … just to give this some context. Communications and the Governance Model…….. a critical part of the project An overview of the actual rollout model we followed ……. who was responsible for what areas - very much involves local input Brief out llne of some related projects and plans for the future ……… and finally some hopefully some useful tips so you can learn from our experiences!!!
5 Colleges and 35 Schools 23,000 students & 3000 staff 30 Admin. Office 75 Research Related and others There was a major restructuring and rebranding of the University a couple of years before we began the CMS project proper. This was a benefit for the project as they were preceived as being separate in the eyes of the Community and reduced down the no. of entities we were dealing with. Target of 140 sites in 1 st Phase This is out of approx. 250 active websites on the main University web server …. includes clubs/socieites research projects … everything. This was as much a guesstimate as anything else and was based on a team of two working on the project full time for approx 30 months – we did not quiet make this but have come very close Old Environment – all FTP / Dreamweaver …… ..as many of you are very use to – we had no CMS before the introduction of SiteManager.Just some local installations of Drupal and Plone managed locally but certainly no campus wide application.
Some stats on our CMS environment 115 Sites Integrated with CMS 65,140 pieces of content 33 Contributors 317 Moderators – Most of our users are moderators and typically have 2 – 3 users sharing responsibility for content updating – therefore very few using formal workflow tools. 34 Power Users Administrators We are currently on SM 5.4 and are soon to move 6.2 which we have in test and I’m looking forward to a quick move from there to SM 7.0 which we are all hearing about today. I love the interface in 7.0 which is bang up to date. Not just saying that because I want………
Current Project Status broken down by area We have a good spread of sites across different University areas.. We mainly integrated sites on the basis of “first come first server” – probably out biggest uptake initially was in the College of Arts and Celtic studies and the worst was from the more technical side of the College, the Engineering related Schools.
Project Scope This is a Work Breakdown Structure for the project and it’s a great way to present the detailed scope of the project . Each of these branches represents a major work strand of the project and further breaks it down into work packages and on to actual tasks. Wor through branches etc……. I’ve left a few out because I could not get them to fit It is a great tool to highlight the overall scope of a project like this down to the level of task and can be used for demonstrating to important stakeholders the level / scale of work that will be involved. I’m going to talk now about the last two strands here Roll-Out and Project Communications and Governance.
CMS Steering Group with Independent Chair CMS Steering Group was set up to oversee the project as a whole. We were only allowed to proceed to the next stage of the project on approval of the steering group especially at the tender state. So we reported in at each stage of the tender and the final selection was formally approved by this group. We also reported into this group at each stage of the rollout. Any areas of controversy were brought back to this group for discussion and decision. Group had an independent chair – this person has changed a few times since the project started off 3 years ago Communications Office were responsible for: Branding/Look and Feel IT Services were responsible for: Project Management Other Stakeholders Representative from Research, Administration and various Colleges and Schools. This was done to ensure that the project was not perceived as just being from IT Services – we wanted the stakeholders to view the project in so far as is possible as their own – we typically have 12 – 14 members at teach meeting .
Project Communications Joint Lecture tour with Communications Office We undertook a lecture tour to all the Colleges and Schools to highlight that the CMS was now available and to highlight the many benefits. It was a joint tour with Communications so that it would emphasise the importance of content. Dedicated section of website We used this to provide basic support materials as well as project news updates new significant site / project status etc. Special Promotional Brochure We have some of these available here if anyone wants to have a look – basically provides a summary of what the project is all about. CMS Training and 1 to 1 sessions We provide all end user training in house – we run courses every 2-3 weeks for 2-3 hours which we find is plenty to get the standard non web person up and running. Quotes Feedback from Pilot Participants We use these as a means to promote the project this was one of the best ways to promote the service basically “word of mouth” …………. examples to follow Branding “Look & Feel” Policies We highlighted these with the Comms. Office as part of the lecture tour. However the policy in this area has being a little “grey” at times. samples include …………..
Standard site design for Veterinary Medicine …. fairly basic example. All college / school sites are a variation on this. We use single template for the news on homepage / news listing and the news item itself. Very effective.
Teaching and Learning website …. nice treatment of the standard look and feel but there was a mountain of integration work – it might as well have been a completely different “look and feel”. Repeating this process for every site will ruin the economies of scale.
This is the standard Research Institute / Centre design. The research community were seen to have their own specific site design requirements. We have two standard designs which greatly speeds up the process. We did integrate some other designs from some centres and projects but these take up a high amount of resources. You definitely don’t want to be integrating 10 – 15 different designs. All the economies of scale are in keeping things as standard as possible.
Pilot Feedback We gathered this feedback after the pilot stage of the project. These were two of the Pilot Participants who on the whole were very happy with their projects. This is by far the best promotional tool of the lot. UCD Research Office would be a very high profile group in the University so getting them on board early on certainly helped us in the rollout to the research community.
Quick run through the phases for migrating to the new systen – Basically this explains our model for Roll Out. Planning It’s a prerequisite to nominate a site manager/coordinator who will work with cms team on the migration We have also agreed with the communications office to liase with them on content preparation and site layout – so the first step is to start the content planning process with the Communications Office – probably take 6 – 8 weeks. Design and Build There will they be a requirement to layout the site architecture including site map/navigation and page layouts (templates) a lot of this work will be done if using the standard templates. We will then integrate skeleton site and do administrator training. Content Migration There is a migration tool developed but there will still be a requirement for a large amount of manual migration work of existing content. There will then be a requirement for a testing phase and definition of QA areas and workflows for content approval. At this stage we will be in a position to train the content contributors who will then be trained on the full site which will give them a full “in context” training session – which will make it easier for them.
In house Dedicated Support Team Project Manager Project Management more critical at the early stages of the project. More case of repeating the same process over again once in the production phase. Although many larger sites become mini projects of their own. Technology Development Specialist Really a job that involves a bit of everything. Some sys admin skills, html, css, scripting etc. client liasion. Customer Support Team Member Focused more on site integration work with some design work as well. Deals a lot with clients on support and training as well. Graphic design skills / html / css / scripting Support from existing Web Services Team We also have some support from the non cms team who support the old legacy environment sites of FTP and Dreamweaver – it is unlikely that these will remain to some extent. Support Days with Terminal Four Heavily weighted toward pilot & early roll-out phase – we used these for specific projects including – the initial pilot phase before we recruited our support team, events calendar development and Research Management System Profiles integration and development work.
Just worth noting some of the projects that relate directly to our CMS Project. Research Management System Profiles The RMS system is a repository of staff CV’s and profiles – we take the output from the system take in through Sitemanager and apply local college/school styles to it and integrate it fully as part of the local website. Intranet Environment Sitemanager is used to manage content for this environment – users can use the same authoring environment to publish to their website as to their intranet Events Calendar I think we were the first site to use T4’s calendar engine (java app for engine) with content managed through SM Structured database content e.g. programme content Only looking at this we have done a proof of concept but we want to basically give this the same treatment as our RMS profiles Google Search We have our own GSA’s – we roll out site searches for sites integrated with CMS although they are not exclusively dependent on eachother. Legacy sites can have our google search on their sites. Bi and multilingual web content We have 3 – 4 sites now which are fully bilingual and will have more demands in this area from our International Office. Accessibility Obligations The more standardised sites are the better will the performance in terms of accessibility. The less margin there is for adding in new sections on the fly the better.
AT LEAST TRY TO KEEP THE PERCEPTION SEPARATE – YOUR CMS WILL BE ABLE TO ACCOMMODATE DIFFERENT DESIGNS. SO THIS IS REALLY A POLICY ISSUE NOT A TECHNICAL ISSUE.
I FOUND THIS TO BE ONE OF THE MOST BENEFICIAL AREAS OF THE WHOLE PROJECT. IT ALLOWS YOU TO PROMOTE THE PROJECT AS BEING DRIVEN BY USER REQUIREMENTS AND YOU CAN PROVIDE THE EVIDENCE TO BACK THIS UP IF YOU HAVE DONE THE WORK. INCLUDE SOME OF THE NEER SAYERS IN THIS PROCESS AND IN THIS WAY YOU MEET THEIR ISSUES HEAD ON.!!
IT IS WORK FIGHTING FOR RESOURCES AT THE START OF THE PROJECT. IT WILL TAKE A LOT OF EFFOR TO DRIVE THE PROJECT – THERE IS DANGER OF FAILURE IF THIS IS LUMPED ON TOP OF EXISTING WORK AND EXISTING TEAM.
THIS KEEPS YOU IN TOUCH WITH YOUR END USERS AND THEIR CONCERNS AND REQUIREMENTS.
THIS WILL SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE THE TIME AND EXPENSE REQUIRED TO ROLLOUT YOUR CMS. THERE WILL ALSWAYS BE SOME REQUIREMENT TO DO CUSTOMISATION TO MEET LOCAL REQUIREMENS BUT THIS NEEDS TO BE KEPT A MINIMIMUM.
I KNOW THIS IS A BIT OF COMMON SENSE BUT START WITH THE EASY PROJECTS. SELECT THOSE THAT ARE VERY KEEN AND HAVE THE LOCAL TIME AND RESOURCES TO BACK THIS UP. THESE EARLY ADOPTERS WILL THEN CHAMPION THE PROJECT FOR YOU.
I KNOW THIS IS A BIT OF COMMON SENSE BUT START WITH THE EASY PROJECTS. SELECT THOSE THAT ARE VERY KEEN AND HAVE THE LOCAL TIME AND RESOURCES TO BACK THIS UP.
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