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And That’s a Wrap

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It finally happened. The website refresh, Phase 1 of a multi-year deep look into the UTC website, has officially closed out as a project. The refresh began in October 2018.

We chose a ‘refresh’ over ‘redesign’ as we wanted to address the following goals:

  • Accessibility of the entire site.
  • Elimination of old, outdated content and pages (also to reduce page count).
  • Responsive design regardless of audience viewing on a smartphone, tablet or computer.
  • Establish more consistency across the entire site to improve user experience.
  • Focus attention on the external audiences of the site, specifically attracting and retaining students.

So, what did we really accomplish? In the course of the refresh, we reviewed more than 4,300 pages currently in OU Campus. For the data geeks in the readership, that translates into the following:

  • We conducted 41 intake meetings (41 hours of at least two and sometimes four Communications and Marketing staff time not counting department participants’ time).
  • Some intake meetings involved multiple offices within a college or department.
  • Each intake meeting generated at least one more deeper dive meeting (roughly an additional 40 hours for Sarah Joyner plus department editorial participants).
  • Outside of the intake meeting, the Communications and Marketing Web team spent additional hours (untracked) to prepare test versions of new pages and Google docs to manage the review process over a three-week period for each of the 41 offices/departments.
  • Additional weekly hours were used for project management by yours truly (tracked and amounting to about 560 hours).

Initially, we had hoped to review every site within the UTC website but we allowed large departments and the colleges and schools to prioritize their sites so that we kept the project moving and addressed the most critical needs. Some sites are still being addressed that were not part of the prioritization. We are making every attempt to work with all the departments for refresh requests but our focus now is on the migration to Drupal so there may be some delays. We appreciate your understanding and patience while we shift gears.

Take Two

Phase 2, the migration to Drupal, began last spring and is ramping up for the first 200 pages to go into production. The Web developers have been busy building out the environments in the Acquia Cloud, adding to the UTC Drupal codebase, creating workflows to move code from place to place, testing user experience and permissions, and preparing for demonstrations of content deployed in Drupal.

This will be another multi-month project but until we have those first 200 pages up and running, and we can start to see how long it actually takes to move a page from OU Campus to Drupal, the actual schedule is a bit up in the air. For the most part, the work will be on the Communications and Marketing team and you may only be marginally aware of what is happening behind the scenes.

Like any good cinematic trilogy, though, Phase 3 will be the much-anticipated Redesign. During those 41 intake meetings in the last year, many of you expressed your excitement over what is to come. Phase 3 will be where the real show begins!

Just like in the film world, though, we are only as good as our last movie.  Our migration to Drupal is the sequel to our hugely popular, box-office extravaganza with a cast of thousands, known as the Website Refresh.  So here’s looking at you, kid and stay tuned for coming attractions!

 

For more on the difference between a ‘refresh’ and a ‘redesign, visit the FX Blog on the topic Refresh vs Redesign.

 

The Shortest Pencil Beats the Longest Memory

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My husband is a woodworker. He reads, plans, makes notes, makes more notes, draws pictures, creates mock-ups from cardboard, practices his ideas on leftovers, figures out the cost of materials, scouts various hardware stores, and eventually he starts the actual building of a project. I frequently tell him he has all the hallmarks of a great project manager, although his projects seldom complete on the schedule I provide!

So this weekend, in his new issue of Fine Homebuilding magazine, he points out an article on “Trading in your hammer for a clipboard.” My personal and professional life collided.

I don’t have a good analogy for the hammer, but I can say that many of those tasks listed above have happened in various forms to bring the Web Refresh project team to this point.

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The Fine Art of Following Up

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Nobody likes to be nagged. Whether it comes from your mom, your spouse, or your boss, it may have more to say about the nagger than the naggie.

To be a good project manager, one must find ways of following up that yield results over resentment. As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, a role of a project manager is to make sure a project completes on time, at or under budget and within scope. I also like to add a fourth element and that’s to maintain a positive, productive working relationship with all the stakeholders on a project. I’m happy if no one dies or is incarcerated as a result of a project I’ve managed!

Projects can easily get off track. Especially during summer, project participants go on vacation, take days off for holidays or generally are away from the office. Yet the project remains. So it is with our Website Refresh project.

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Spring Cleaning Sparks Joy

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I dedicate this post to Donny Behneman as my latest mantra has become “Does this webpage spark joy?” Or a variation, “Does this PDF spark joy?” Or “Does this photo spark joy?”

As we work our way through the UTC website, one topic in each intake meeting has to do with a review of pages that can potentially be deleted. Old, outdated content contributes, in large part, to the refresh effort. Schedules from 2014, a PDF form from 2011, a photo of a student who has long since graduated all come to light during the refresh process.

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A Look Back…and Forward

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As this will be the last post before Winter Break and the end of 2018, let’s take a look back over the last several months. Pour yourself a virtual toddy, throw a log on the fire and reflect on what has been accomplished.

Website Refresh: We have refreshed content, revitalized pages and transformed sites across the student-facing galaxy this fall. By the time you read this, these pages will be showing off their fresh new look and feel: [Read more…]

A Thanksgiving of Progress

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Time to assess progress and celebrate accomplishments! I started working with the UTC Communications and Marketing team in mid-September to provide project management for the Drupal migration. As projects often layout, a few other tasks have crept into the initial plan, but I’d like everyone to recognize what has been accomplished in summary form:

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What’s the UTC Website Refresh Process?

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Similar to Cajun cooking, where the common understanding is that first you make a roux, before we can migrate to a new CMS, we need to make an inventory.

Simply moving out-of-date content or pages that aren’t working properly would lead to prolonged clean-up in the long run. The website refresh phase of improvement to utc.edu focuses on the clean-up and reorganization of existing content.

To begin the process, we are starting with sites that focus most heavily on students.

[Read more…]