Whew, I don’t have the stats on here, but man what a HUGE project. Like Donald Trump HUGE.

These are notes from a talk by Jeff Stevens titled “Metropolis and Gotham, A Tale of Two Cities: Two Different Approaches to Enterprise Site Development” during the HighEdWeb 2015. University of Florida Health

Slack

  • Two major projects: UFHealth.org (External Facing) & Bridge (Intranet)

UFHealth.org [Metropolis]

  • Unify Web Properties
  • Focus on Patients
  • Change starts at the top
  • … and then from deep within the organization
  • Senior Leadership must be able to recognize positive change, empower it, and embrace process and goals.
  • Committees are vital.
    • Champions of the goals, expertise, and process.
    • Choose people by expertise and skills over position.
    • Choose people that will help, not hinder.
  • Smart shared governance
  • Elevate Innovation
  • CMS Selection Committee
  • Select a team.
  • Design Committee (presented as if they were agencies)
  • Information Architecture Committee
  • Content and Governance Committee
  • After those committees were finished, they were reformed into smaller working groups.
  • 80/20 rule, 20% of the people in the committees did 80% of the work and were chosen for the working group.
  • Web team served as consultants than as leaders of the committees, and served as the secretaries.
  • Show your work (tiered unveiling and iterative change)
  • Training on the new systems, lectures, emails, blogs, and 1 on 1
  • Lot of positive improvements in metrics (pageviews/patient appointments, etc.)
  • Silos and Holdouts: Left them alone; eventually senior leadership applied the pressure.
  • Provided more Services/Support
  • Compromise
  • Time: Migration time was limited, but was mitigated by training.
  • Uniformity: stadard template, developed enough configurable options into the templates eventually. Vetted plugins

UF Bridge

  • Unify Intranets
  • News and Team Building
  • Because of the success of the UFHealth team, they were given the intranet project.
  • Built it on WordPress (BuddyPress)
  • Building a team: Existing team + an additional content coordinator
  • Do deep research: Nielsen Intranet Report, Interviews, Card Sorts
  • Did much of the process along.
  • Mitigating Annxiety: build buy-in
  • Development took 18 months, 9 months to migrate.
  • Content and Governance: Content Audits; Training; New Structures and Procedures
  • Compliance
  • Team Burnout: since no one “cares” about the intranet…; more team building events; more communication from Senior Leadership; scope reduction
  • Information Architecture: Dynamic Site vs Quicklinks; Card Sorting and Curated Links
  • Tech Issues: Servers, On the Floor Interfaces; Solutions; Be agile; have teams ready
  • External sites: weren’t able to do as much for the external sites during the project.
  • The Unexpected

Hybrid Approach

  • Magazine Theme: Second external facing theme that is for the magazines.
  • UF Health Directory: Ties in academic and patient areas for a unified directory.
  • UF Style Changes
  • SPEED
  • Both have the same goal: to help people. Make mistakes, better.

Peace
– KS
Web Developer at Benedictine University near Chicago