Publishing platform project sprint note #1

Hello! I’m Dave and I have recently joined Luton part time to help move some digital change stuff forwards. Here’s a photo of one of our cats:

One of the things I am working on is our approach to our online experience. We have kicked off a programme of work to look at this, and the first thing we are looking at is our publishing platform.

Background

Before we get into that, what do we mean by “online experience”? We’ve picked this slightly wonky term, because “website” doesn’t nearly cover the complexity of what we are dealing with. A council’s online experience is made up of a website, but also a load of other stuff: forms systems, workflow systems, line of business portals, separate capabilities like booking and paying, microsites, and a bunch of other things as well.

Here’s an overly simplified example of what that looks like, by mapping technology capabilities:

By taking a strategic approach to our whole online experience, it means we can bring consistency across the board, no matter which bit of tech a user might be interacting with.

This is a lot to tackle, and we are producing a strategy to guide us through making it all happen. While we do that though, we know for a fact that we need to get a wriggle on looking at our publishing platform (or content management system, to use the more technical term), which needs to change so we can modernise the website, which is starting to look a little tired.

Sprint Notes

So, what did we get done in our first sprint? Basically, we focused on getting the publishing platform procurement (the three Ps!) up and running.

First, we stood up our team. I’m holding the role as delivery manager. Atika, the boss, is acting as service owner. Rich, our website lead, is product manager. Frank is our technical architect, and Hazel is on board as a key stakeholder as the Head of Digital and Data. Finally, Su joined as the contracts and procurement specialist.

We’ll add more roles in as we need them.

Second, we made the strategic decision to go with LocalGov Drupal as our core technology. We compared it to a number of alternatives, commercial and open source, based on the following criteria:

• Experience within Luton – there are people in the council familiar with the technology and how it works
• Local government track record – the CMS must be in use in a number of councils across the country
• Local government specialised – the CMS should be designed specifically around the needs of local councils
• Open source – the CMS should make its source code openly available
• Collaboration – the CMS should have an active community of councils improving and supporting the software
• Rich ecosystem – the CMS should have a large marketplace of suppliers who can develop, design, host and support it
• Zero cost licence fee – as well as being open source, the licence for the software should be free of charge, so we can spend the money saved on implementing it

Once we made that decision, we chatted to other councils and suppliers in the LocalGov Drupal community about how to best procure support to migrate our website. We managed to get hold of over 20 example sets of procurement documents, which will really help speed up this process for us.

We then met with procurement colleagues to figure out our approach, wanting to move as quickly as possible while still sticking to the Council’s procurement regulations. Think we got to a really good point, and procurement won’t be a barrier, which is great news!

What’s next

Next, we will be writing up our spec for the procurement, and exploring the frameworks to allow us to procure the additional support we need.

We’ll then start to put some flesh on the bones of our wider online experience strategy, an element of which will be content design – and nailing the governance around content will be key to creating an maintaining an excellent experience for our users in the future.