Wireframes agreed, design here we come!

So after a manic week of meetings I now have final sign off on the wireframe layouts for the new website homepages and content pages. It's fair to say that there will be a significant change in the way our information is presented and the way we work with content within the CMS.

As anyone who has presented a wireframe layout will know it's not the most interesting part of the project unless you're interested in content layout! But, we've put in some very solid foundations to build and expand upon once we take full control of the CMS later this year.

The really interesting part will be on Friday when we get our first look at the concept designs. After an initial viewing it will be down to meetings with the Steering & Working groups to pass out the information for feedback  and everyone has an opinion on visual designs!

Agile? Just call me twinkle toes...

Brace yourself... it's a mini bragging session this one!

So after a four day intensive course in Agile Project Management I finally got the call with the results this morning and... i'm now a certified Agile Project Manager!

Agile started life as a development methodology for software development and has progressed to a very powerful way to manage virtually any project. Ideal for me as we're right in the starting stages of our CMS project and luckily they're using Agile & Waterfall.

The course is well worth thinking about if you are a PRINCE2 PM and are looking to add to your skill set. As a taster, if you can get the idea of the diagram above you're half way there and if you want to know more, check out this entry on Wikipedia.

Congratulations to Julia & Ash who also passed with flying colours, now it's time to apply the methodology to our projects!

Analysis phase... done!

So, we are now five weeks into our project and we are at the end of our Analysis Phase and all of our workshops are done... Phew!

Having had 9 workshops scheduled we managed to wizz our way through and complete them all in only 8 sessions, super efficient! The outcome of all of these workshops is that we now have some detailed wireframes for the website layout and they're looking really good. Even without a design on them the wireframes show that we will have a very visual change to the websites key landing pages and a huge shift towards a site that is focused on our key audience, the prospective student!

So now we have some quiet time where I need to get sign off from the steering group and Squiz need to start work on the design concepts for the website. Then, we start moving into the implementation phase, the data migration and integration stages should prove very interesting. We have a lot of complicated systems at the University and some of the key ones will need to be able to push data to the websites. Luckily initial findings are looking very promising however, I always stay a little concerned until it's all in place and working!

1 month into a 6 month project and not only are we on budget, on time and on scope but we're also all still talking to each other, a very positive sign!

Workshop, workshop, workshop...

It's been a manic few weeks with a huge number of Analysis workshops both with Squiz and Internally but we're making some really interesting conclusions around the user journey within our site and also the availability of content for visitors. We've had workshops to cover LDAP, content migration, design, user journeys, wireframes and taxonomies!

The conclusion is that we're looking at rolling out a shiny new website with some very clever functionality that reflects the needs of our audience providing them with everything they could need to find a course and make an application. Hopefully we'll be able to pleasantly surprise a few of our key stakeholders whilst we're at it as well!

So, we have another three weeks of analysis workshops and then we'll be looking at starting the build. The migration stages are going to be interesting with a variety of different systems all required to pull various pieces of data. Our saving grace at the moment is the inclusion of Funnelback within our planning, this could be the answer to at least a couple of our issues!

Week one is over with!

So, the first workshop session has taken place with Squiz and we have covered a lot of ground already. These early sessions are to help us look at how we are set-up at the moment and what potential issues we may have with migration of content to the new CMS.

A lot of thinking!

We have a very good website structure in place and this should work to our advantage, the issues start to arise when we look at the content within the site and the reasons things are there! This move looks like the perfect opportunity to have a deep clean of website content and project sites. With around 7,500 pages to migrate we should easily be able to remove 5% of those.

The next session is scheduled in for Friday and we're looking to cover Content Migration, LDAP, Single Sign On and the User Journey. Time to roll our sleeves up and get down to some technical discussions!

We've been Squiz'd...

Part one of our exciting news can now be shared... we're moving to a new Content Management System!

After a round of tendering and a selection process we have decided that all University websites will be migrated to the MySource Matrix CMS and supported by Squiz. We have had a fantastic run with our current system and have produced a multi-award winning website and we're now looking to continue that success by harnessing the power of Matrix.

The system comes with some very powerful tools built in that would allow us to provide all prospective students, current students and staff with a highly personalised browsing experience within a newly designed site.

I'll be keeping the blog up-to-date with what we are up to so make sure you check back for or status reports!

Happy New Year everyone!

Lots of exciting things have happened over the Christmas period following a round of rather well received proposals for development work. Stay tuned for updates as they are officially signed off as i'll be posting all of the details on here!

We're all looking forward to a very exciting 2011...