BirkbeckUniversity of London

BBK-XCRI: future-proofing our course data systems and procedures

What’s got us through?k Goodwill/professionalism of project teamk Cross-department workingk High-quality and dependable

outsourcing agenciesk Agile project management methodologyk Fully documented project meetingsk Internal communications tool (Yammer) replacing

email as basis for all project conversations, agreements, minutes, agendas, etc.

k Biscuits and chocolate!

Project steps

Business process review: Cross-department stakeholders; post-it notes!

Competitor analysis: What works? What doesn’t?

New technical infrastructure: new Oracle database (PDB) pulling data

from 3 data sources – data export to Plone CMS: output for web and print

5New ER role: Support and quality control; approval – cut down on bottleneck

4New workflow: Fully devolved content maintenance to School staff, with QA safeguards

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Technical spec/development: Fully dressed use cases for CMS development; fully documented processes for PDB; wireframes for all web pages

6New XCRI-CAP feed

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Main challenge2 key project staff left within the first 3 months. What did we do?

k Re-engineered project plan

k Reset priorities and reschedule deadlines

k Converted project into stages

k Outsourced development work

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