How transforming a university website led to transforming an in-house and agency relationship

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.

Over the last 3 years, manifesto and the Prospective Student Web team from The University of Edinburgh have 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