Digirati

Case Study - Communities and Local Government

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Background

Communities and Local Government (CLG) is a central government department with over 3000 members. It sets policy on local government, housing, urban regeneration, planning, fire and rescue, race equality, and community cohesion. The CLG Web Rationalisation Project was a large-scale enterprise content management government portal project which consisted of 4 main deliverables: the CLG main website, the CLG Intranet, the Info4local Portal and a system to facilitate the delivery of future public microsites.

Thorough Research

The 4 main workstreams were all delivered using our Delivery and Best Practices Methodology. As with all significant large-scale projects the first step was stakeholder engagement which in this case involved identifying and canvassing users of the different departmental subject areas. Over 60 workshops were held across 8 identified user groups. These workshops gathered feedback on the existing systems, user experiences and requirements, and feasibility testing for potential new plans and ideas. Card sorts were held within these workshops along with usability studies with wireframes and feedback of paper graphic designs. A Project Initiation Document was then created using standard PRINCE2 Methodologies.

Extensive Content Rationalisation & Migration

Functional and content rationalisation was the main challenge of this project. Multiple sites and content sources were rationalized, consolidated and then migrated into a new CMS system and infrastructure. The new main CLG website became a consolidation of 4 different sites which had each been running on different CMS platforms. There were also a further 20+ sites that also needed to be migrated across as microsites.

Initially a content audit for this was run which involved reviewing over 9000 documents and 20,000 pages and creating a new information architecture for that content. This rationalisation project involved extensive editorial reviewing as well as usability testing using sort card techniques and task-based tests. The first deliverable was a content map detailing where each existing content item would be located, whether to expire the content and/or to add/update new content. Content was then migrated automatically from the legacy CMS to the new CMS using our own migration tools. The content was parsed as part of this operation to add more structure to individual content items so that the new system would be far more dynamic and manageable.

Comprehensive Process Mapping and Technical Design

The authoring model for these systems was particularly complex as the authoring process was devolved to users from different departments and different previous sites with various access rights and authoring capabilities within the system. The fact that authors were not necessarily within the CLG network and required a variety of secure authoring tools made the task even more challenging. With a large amount of devolved users, granular workflow and access restrictions were a high priority. To ensure that all content is kept up to date an automated email notification system was built that notifies authors to either update or archive old content. Content is automatically archived if the users do not respond to the notification after a certain time period.

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