We believe that the use of Drupal for the institutional website and the approach taken by the University will be compelling and relevant to a wide audience. We plan to use engaging slides to tell the project story. We will engage attendees with real life examples of the day-to-day challenges of such a large project in a widely devolved organisation and how these were addressed with business partners. We will explain why we chose Drupal against other open source and commercial CMS offerings. Furthermore, we will use scenarios from the project to demonstrate how opportunities were seized from the challenges that arose. We will also emphasise the lessons learned along the way. We will demo our new site and contrast the new features with their implementation in our legacy CMS.

The top takeaways
1. How using Drupal and engaging with the open source community can provide a cost effective long term CMS solution.
2. How a methodical, structured approach to epic challenges can open up opportunities for the University.
3. How working together across multiple departments can produce an effective agile project team and understanding what needs to be in place to facilitate this.
4. How the lessons we are learning along the way are being implemented.

Background
There is a huge challenge in satisfying an ever-increasing number of CMS requirements from different areas of our University. In a highly devolved organisation these requirements often conflict with one another. Our presentation will showcase how several teams from different areas in the organisation collaborated and became an effective agile team dedicated to delivering our Drupal CMS.

Our vision is to deliver an enterprise solution to a devolved organisation. We are building “BRIDGES” between the different areas of the University:
• BUSINESS Facilitate online business for all areas of the University
• ROBUST Be robust, resilient and scalable
• INNOVATION Support flexible and innovative web development
• DEVICES A quality website user experience across multiple devices
• GOVERNED Be governed and managed by a central service with inclusive, transparent processes
• EASY Quick and easy for all levels of CMS user
• STANDARDS Support the generation of standards and legislation compliant website content

We have taken a wide spectrum of user stories from the very technical to the non-technical and are modelling these into variations of a CMS service. We are also putting in place a representative Change Advisory Board. We will present how we have used: the requirements gathering process, the project methodology, lessons learned from comms with other HE institutions and the chosen open source technology to steer towards and reach these goals. We believe that the approach adopted by the University can be successfully applied by other institutions regardless of size.

Please note this presentation will build on the presentation given by Stratos on business day at DrupalCamp Scotland 2014.