Growing a team to transform a university website
manifesto has partnered with the University of Edinburgh to deliver several business-critical Drupal websites. We will highlight key learnings, challenges and personal development that occurred during this multi-year partnership as the combined team turned the initial vision into reality.
From 2021 to 2024, manifesto and the Prospective Student Web team from The University of Edinburgh worked together to not only deliver a new student-centred presence but also generate new ways of working within an evolving and improving multidisciplinary agile team.
The degree finder is a crucial service for higher education organisations as the main entry point for prospective students to find information about programmes that they can apply for. In 2021 the University of Edinburgh and manifesto began the process of designing and developing a new degree finder experience using Drupal as part of a wider modernisation of their platforms.
In this session Aaron McHale, technical lead for Prospective Student Web from The University of Edinburgh and James South, principal engineer from manifesto will talk about the multi-year project.
We will cover the following areas:
Our vision for the new service
Building relationships within a cross-discipline team
Coordination with other areas of the University
Early-stage planning and backlog writing
Designing and developing the service
How our ways of working evolved
Challenges we faced and how we overcame them
Shared language and common understanding between content, UX and development
Launching the service
Measuring success
Personal growth of team members
Learning Objectives:
Understand how Drupal is being used in higher education settings
Project planning and backlog writing
Solutions architecture
Developing a service alongside wider transformation in an organisation
Facilitating collaboration between colleagues in a cross-discipline team
Effective decision making
Developing a beta service
Promoting a beta to a live service
Managing a roadmap
Facilitating personal development in a project team