Our new service to the University student recruitment community launches soon in early March. But the step change is not coming from the technology. It’s from how the team functions, and there’s a lot here that they’re rightly proud of.

The journey, not the destination

Our two-and-a-half years of software design and development are now over. The new content management system is in active use ahead of the launch of the 2026 entry undergraduate provision.

We recently held our last project board meeting at which I was able to confirm we’d achieved  all our anticipated deliverables. But more importantly, I gave focus to what made us confident we would be achieving the outcomes we sought.

I asked the team what they were most proud of, and directed them to think about the things that weren’t in our project deliverables, the kinds of things stakeholders might not notice or necessarily value.

They talked about a range of topics, all of which I’d broadly categorise as being about the journey, not the destination.

You might think, “So what? It’s the new website that people will see, and what the University tasked you with producing.”

But the thing is, the destination is a myth. There is no done. There are always things that could be better. Ways in which we can improve the student and the staff editor experience. Ways in which we can save the institution money.

When you think like this, the journey, the ways in which we get the job done, become increasingly important.

We are transforming not through what we are delivering but through how we think, how we engage, how we behave. And this came through loud and clear in the things the team highlighted as what they were most proud of.

Project achievements behind the website delivery

Here are the project achievements Aaron (Anaylst/Developer and Tech Lead), Pete (UX Specialist) Lauren and Jen (Senior Content Designers) highlighted for our project board.

It’s a terrible cliche but it’s true. The website we’re launching really is the tip of the iceberg. So much of what we’ve achieved over the past three years is under the surface.

New features

• Website interface elements which were shown to overcome issues students had with the long degree profile page: in-page navigation and a new approach to mobile presentation, refined heading style and weighting, and increased text spacing for better readability.
• Re-usable content functionality which removes the need for repeat editorial updates across large volumes of programmes.
• Comment functionality which is going to transform our engagement during the annual editorial review process, and save weeks of copy-and-pasting between systems.
• The promise of future changes and improvements without dependencies on other parties or project funding.

User-centred design approach

• Conducting user research ahead of development beginning to understand prospective student needs that directly informed the content design.
• Laying the groundwork for system design through content auditing and content modelling, which led to a well-specified set of requirements from a content design team who were confident in what the University needed and why.
• Co-design with school-based colleagues which got content designers a closer understanding of the business need, and fostered trust with the user community. As a result, we received no major pushbacks on the designs we were proposing.

Improving working practices

• Evolving our working processes as we went through regular retrospectives and open communication between team members. As the project progressed, we got faster and reduced the error rate in what got produced.

Community engagement

• Sharing our user insight with the marketing and student recruitment community which is helpful for their work, but also instils confidence in the user requirements we’ve been working to meet.
• Inviting colleagues to watch students and staff interact with our work-in-progress, and contribute to prioritisation of improvements gave them a preview of what was coming and an understanding of how people would use what we’ve been building.

Working relationships

• Collaboration with SRA Admissions on entry requirements presentation design that has built a strong ongoing relationship and given them confidence in the effectiveness of the design we evolved together.
• Collaboration between developers and the Content Operations team to design new workflows and working practices that remove inefficiencies and frustrations.
• An opportunity to reconfigure existing working relationships, especially with the postgraduate user group and with Student Systems, and the opportunity to better understand processes and constraints on each side.
• Overcoming challenges in developing on top of EdWeb 2, and arriving at a positive place in terms of support and potential future collaboration with IS Website and Communications.
• The growth of a strong working relationship with our development partner Manifesto, and with their support develop our in-house capacity for technical leadership.

Our principles are showcased in our team behaviours

When I established the team back in 2019, one of my first blogs was about principles. I was, and continue to be, inspired by what Jeff Gothelf has to say about product management and culture. And this I feel has become established in our team.

Taking a principled approach – my blog post from November 2019

We value learning as much as we value delivering.

We work in the open and aren’t afraid to engage our community with our work-in-progress, even when it highlights where we haven’t got things right.

We’re evidence and insight-driven, which gives us confidence in our openness.

We operate in a continuous feedback loop with our customers and users through user research, usability testing, co-design and playbacks.

We are humble enough to recognise our requirements are hypotheses and the vision I set out for our work is only a set of assumptions. We continue to challenge my/our assumptions in positive and constructive ways.

So yes, we’re using new technologies. And yes, we have new opportunities arising from these which we have sought to capitalise on.

But the most fundamental change we have brought is in our behaviours. How we work together as a team, how we engage our stakeholders, customers and end users. This is what is delivering change and improvement, both now and on into the future.

Read more

We’ve been writing about our work on this project since before it started.

See the archive of past blog posts about the delivery of our new provision for prospective students

Technology alone doesn’t deliver transformation / Future student online experiences by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0