Driving cultural change through website delivery

Manifesto partnered with the University of Dundee to build a complex, robust web platform to serve the needs of the institution’s many audiences. Working as an extension of the internal team, we helped them build capability and confidence in iterative ways of working, digital best practice, and a raft of technologies including Drupal.

Bringing a wealth of research into focus

After selecting Drupal and Acquia’s platform for building their new website, the University of Dundee needed both technical expertise and guidance throughout the delivery project, and help with translating their initial research – gathered from over 100 stakeholders from across the organisation – into a high-level backlog and delivery plan. As well as delivering a new site to meet the needs of their various audiences, they also wanted to drive cultural change through the project, building internal digital capability and confidence.

Collaborating on a phased delivery

Working to a tight deadline, we collaborated intensively with the University of Dundee to unpick their initial research, help them better understand and segment their users, and build a substantial backlog of features to act as the backbone of the project. We then helped prioritise and refine these features into an MVP launch phase for July 2019 and subsequent releases leading through to the shutdown of the current platform in December 2020. Running solution design sprints in parallel with delivery sprints, we helped Dundee establish a process and rhythm for breaking down features into development tasks, while providing technical consultancy to ensure a robust approach.

Confidently delivering with Agile ways of working

Despite a wealth of skills in the University of Dundee team, covering UX research, design, development and content, they were struggling to achieve a cohesive and professionalised approach to digital delivery. We carefully balanced upskilling the team with ensuring that a working platform was delivered for the July 2019 deadline, providing technical leadership alongside agile coaching and product ownership consultancy to continue refining the roadmap and delivery plan. With the first release, focusing on undergraduate course pages, now under their belt, the team continues to grow in confidence as it focuses on delivering new features and areas of the site iteratively over the coming months.

“We chose Manifesto because we felt that their culture was the best fit for our existing team and that they would push us to become better digital professionals. They have exceeded our expectations and have become a real extension of our team. Their work is of a consistently high quality and what has impressed us most is the time they have taken not only to understand the sector that we work in, but also us as a Higher Education institution. Through the tools we have employed as part of this project, we work as closely with them hundreds of miles away as we do with our own colleagues within Dundee.”

– Andrew Millar, Head of Web Services, University of Dundee