The WIPII project has a significant amount to achieve during the remainder of 2015, and into 2016. There is a risk that we will be unable to deliver the full scope within 2015/2016. Prioritising the value of each requirement is a necessity, as is seeking out ways to improve our delivery approach to mitigate this risk.
There needs to be a balance in terms of delivering this year, and delivering value. As a result of this, iterations of releases will allow the highest value content to be released upfront across all topics and programmes. Additional content which provides valuable but lower priority information can follow in subsequent releases. These could be delivered by the project team later in the project or considered for BAU.
The key principles as documented in the business case for the CSP area are as follows:
The key focus is to optimise the content and positioning of this key recruitment information, providing more value to subject information with a focus on why study at Victoria.
This will create:
- One source of the truth, and the removal duplication of content
- A task-based and audience-centric design that directs the audience to the information they need easily and quickly
- Creating easily searchable content with improved navigation.
- Creating easily searchable content with improved navigation.
Below are a number of options to be considered to reduce the time frame in which to deliver the topics and programme pages
| No. | Option | Description | Impact/Risks | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Additional resource | Recruit more writers, could we use any of the marketing staff, potential to use the new web writer (as documented in the change proposal) Use faculty and school staff – potentially helping sourcing content | ||
| 2 | Collapse topics to reduce time | Look for topics which may have similar content and collapse to reduce the number of topics to develop | ||
| 3 | Alternative sources of content | Look for opportunities to use current content rather than sourcing and drafting from scratch | ||
| 4 | Aligning topics and programmes in content development | Where topics and their associated programmes will use the same stakeholder group e.g. Law, address these together. This would improve engagement with stakeholders and potentially speed up the process. | These areas need to be identified and documented for review. | |
| 5 | Planning wider engagement - look at a proposal of an order faculties/schools etc. | Look at how we can group topic and programmes, and the stakeholder input that will be required. Availability for engagement may be the driver of priorities. | ||
| 6 | More media means less writing – what balance is there | Are there opportunities to utilise currently existing new media (e.g. videos) which would reduce the amount of content required? Are there opportunities to develop new media which would be less than the effort to write content in its place? | ||
| 7 | Prioritise UG topics and programmes first | Small number of topics which are PG only – could do these last as we wont be tackling PG programmes now | ||
| 8 | Use existing source material | Use recruitment publications (GUS and Faculty handbooks) as the base source material for developing subject and programme pages. Where more detailed information is needed highlight this and address with school/faculty directly. This will ideally reduce the amount of time surrounding engagement. | ||
| 9 | Review the material required to go-live | Identify the key content required for a "go-live" state (this would be the minimum content required). A base level of information can be agreed, this can then be fleshed out at a later date when work starts on Faculty and school sites, this will also mean the engagement at a detailed level won't need to happen twice. This approach will benefit faculty and school staff as their "sites" content will be addressed as one chunk. | ||
| 10 | Look to combine topics/subjects | Look for areas in subjects and topics where there is considerable overlap. Such as Classics, Greek and Latin or Political Science and Industrial Relations could be combined into one page as they are currently. Look to combine related areas such as Engineering, all languages and education into one topic/subject to reduce the amount of content that needs to be written. | ||
| 11 | Remove postgraduate subjects | Remove any postgraduate topic/subject pages from the list of content to be developed. This can be addressed as part of the postgraduate work to come. | ||
| 12 | Revised delivery approach - top down | Amend delivery approach to deliver value earlier, and focus on the highest priority content. Each of the following are proposed as a deliverable to build on to eventually deliver the full topic solution. Each deliverable is prioritised using MoSCoW (must, should, could, wont now). Delivery 1: New taxonomy and current content
Delivery 2: UG priority content - replacing sections in the current subject and programme pages
Delivery 3: PG priority content - replacing sections in the current subject and programme pages
Remaining deliverables: Lower priority content
| Some lower priority work may have to be delivered at a later date, so Faculties and Schools work can commence. Implications on templates and page structures for incremental releases. Implications on this approach needs to be discussed with the core team. Careers content writing (in current sprint) may need to be de-prioritised as soon as there is other content work to be picked up. Subjects and programmes may need to be released together across faculty groupings. Delivery 2 could be done incrementally - swapping out content on the subject pages, or all 4 points below done as one release. | Needs to be reviewed with Nigel and PMO. Timeframes for the deliverables need to be considered. Does the taxonomy work on its own purely for navigation purposes? If not at what point is it sensible to provide these groupings on the web site? |