Welcome to today's Session. Lessons learned from our four year Web transformation Project How to Balance and Navigate culture, governance and Technologies presented by Inez Torres Pozo. I encourage you to use the checkbox box on the right hand side of your screen to connect with each other throughout the session. It's off the Q&A box to submit any questions for net Recordings from today's session will be posted in the platform at the end of the conference. Thank you all so much for your participation today, and I'm pleased to welcome Ines Teresa-Palacio from Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. Welcome. Hi. Hello, everyone. Thank you for inviting me this is great to be here sharing with all of you our experience with this web transformation project, which I imagine those of you clearly identify with, because if you work in marketing comms at any of the advancement professions, at some point in your career, you come across having to change a website, update a system or upgrade your brand. But definitely I hope this is of help for for for you on as a system said at the end, I'm very happy to answer any questions that you might have. First of all, I wanted to introduce our institution. So the Open University of Catalonia. This is an online university. We were founded in 1995 as the world's first university with a virtual campus. That meant that. We. From the very beginning, offered students from anywhere the opportunity to study any time. We at the beginning they opened. University of Catalonia had its own methodology of teaching and learning, very much based in projects and an asynchronous way of working. So we don't we don't do face to face virtual lessons, and we allow you to see when to carry on a piece of your own pace. Our headquarters are based in Barcelona, Spain, and they speak to the you can see where I would main offices are. And we also have a network of offices across Spain, Mexico and Colombia. We offer degree, master research, vocational and short programs in Pattern S finance and a few in English and mainly Catalan and Spanish. We actually have more than 400 programs in at least two languages, and at the moment we have more than 90,000 students and more than 100,000 graduates around the world. So it's got a big university and it's one of the biggest in Spain. So what was the starting point? In 2012? I took my role as chief advancement officer in late 2019, just before the pandemic. And we. I very quickly realized that our website had a lot of staff. And. The situation was that we had multiple content management systems that didn't talk among themselves. So different parts of the website were supported by different technological platforms. They didn't talk among themselves, some of them. They were very, very much out of date. Some of them hadn't been updated for more than ten years. The SEO and strategy only was directed to help. One part of the website. One part of the website was the responsibility of the marketing team. The other one was the responsibility of the communications team and the rest. Nobody knew who whose responsibility it was. And we had two different ways of approaching the website from on one side, the commerce perspective of the marketing part of the website, which was mainly all our educational programs. And on the other side was we would just be called the institutional websites. So everything from news to the Vice chancellors office. I. Did, they then agenda and research as well. We had a lot of duplicated content and as I said, no governance and no clear roles and responsibilities that based it. On the left is the map that our technical technology team did alongside a consultant to help me understand the map of different applications that we had interacting with the website. So it was pretty complicated. And at the very early stages of the project, the chief I.T. officer who's been the sponsor of this from the very beginning, said to me very clearly, We will only help if you have a business strategy, meaning we will help if you have a business strategy. But if you don't, then we don't want to be messed around. And that is that is fair enough. But very early on with a very good report and and my my colleague, the Chief Technology chief Information Officer and I have been supporting each other down completely aligned on the strategy from the very beginning. And that has been one of the success factors of the project. We first of all, started by doing a diagnosis of what we had, hence that map that I show you before and from that I, I presented the project to the Board of Directors. What I said. To. Is to start the study provided and really know what it was going to take us that certainly needed to address the situation about the platform. So the technology and renovation of all our content and what best practice approach, because there was a lot of people involved in the website, but there wasn't consistency in how we were applying best practice and an approach to governance so that the very least of proposals. So when I did that, when I presented to the board, I didn't really know what he was going to take us, but I was completely sure that we needed to do something about the website. And the first thing that I was asked to do was. To. Do a business case to make sure that the features made sense. In other words, to justify the investment that it was likely to require and how this was going to translate into a return on investment in terms of more efficiency, less resources, less money spent on licenses. Because we had a lot of licenses for the of people and a lot of different platforms. But most importantly, I was going to help our conversion and our business requirements to acquiring it, because I should have also said that we had we are a university funded by dialogA, funded by the local government. So we have a public mission. But about 80% of our income doesn't come from the government, it comes. From. Our Stephen tuition fees. Therefore I word capacity and the terms including the website to get those leads and convert those leads and translate that into income was absolutely fundamental. And from the very first moment I my argument has been that the website is one of our two main business tools and, and therefore it has a strategic importance. The first lesson I want to share with you is that in my opinion, from what I've learned, you need that the absolute alignment and complicity between the marketing team or the commerce team. If if the website has been led and managed by the by the commerce team and a technology. Team. And that needs to be. From the top. Down to every single person in the. Team. Every single step of this project has been with the collaboration of technology, sometimes led by technology, sometimes led by us, but always, always in absolute. Alignment. The next thing I did was. I. I started to it to read on to find out about what other people had done, had experience in similar projects. And we came across this report by Nelson Norman Group is a little bit out of date now, but it's still very relevant, which did an analysis of more than 100 universities around the world and then made some recommendations. We then used those criteria to do evaluate and do our own analysis of 18 university websites that I put forward from my experience as what I thought was good practice or from institutions that we did worry that competitors, that we thought that they were doing a particularly good job. The team also reviewed some article and I spent some time reviewing literature and reading a lot online, and I also personally data a round of conversations with colleagues from a different universities worldwide. Those are the university. So if some of you are here, I just want to thank you again for your answers. But that was that was amazing because I went into those conversations with a very much open mind to hear what that experience was, what they had learned, because I didn't want to make the same mistakes and I wanted to learn from other people's experience. So my second lesson, I've heard that sometimes in case conferences I said, Dog, you know, okay, Scorpions, deal everything, but I want to change that into another module, which is connect and search for experts. And that was absolutely fundamental. And also to get buy in from the board because I was able to demonstrate that other people, other institutions had done this successfully and that. We. Could do as well. And then so that that took us about six months. And when we got to that point, we were able to start working on the foundations of the project. And to give you an idea, I needed to start off by defining what the website was, because everybody we were talking about the marketing website, the research website, the Vice-Chancellors website. One of the things I said from the very beginning is we have one website with different parts, different components, and each of the components support each other. So I started by making sure that the board and the rest of the people in the organization understood and agreed to a single definition of what we meant when we talked about the website and we had a lot of debate about what was going to be part of the project and what wasn't going to be. And one of the things that was done this very early on was that I, I wanted to start by looking at the external content and therefore we separated all internal contact for our internal audiences and we said that's that's the line. But that took quite a while. Took quite a while because we also found ourselves in this situation where because our internal side wasn't very efficient as soon as we were to make and as soon as we've been making improvements in the external site, everybody wants to publish it on the external side. And I need to remind people of the difference between content for your internal audiences and your internal channels, and content for your external audiences and your external ties. And the other thing that we did was agreed on the sixth strategic objective of that have to do with reputation visibility, the leader strategy on conversion, employment, branding, engagement with our audiences, I noticed very important to meet our compliance requirements at this point in the period I had to do a lot of a lot of explanation about what I meant by web content design, what it meant and why I was so fixated, if you like, on the content. And instead of deciding that the website was what we were going to put any everything that we wanted to, we had to use the website strategically to present to our audiences what they were looking for. And I always use those two diagrams and the link is said, they are not mine, but they, they really help me in the board. Yeah, especially the one on the right. So a lot of a lot of information overload of setting the foundations. So the third lesson I want to share with you is that it's definitely worth investing time defining your objectives on the scope. And you may need to invest a lot of time explaining to basics to some of your key stakeholders to make sure that everybody is talking the same language we that we wouldn't have been able to them. How far the conversations down in the project and I have spent a lot of time doing this. When it came to the A project, I made a proposal to divide it into three parts. One addressing the governance, the other one the tools, and then said one content and usability. And we worked on those in parallel. We also decided to use Agile methodology from day one, and that meant that quite often we didn't know where the project was going to take us. But I had to justify every single penny that we were using. And so it was sometimes challenging to say to the team, We are going to start doing this and we don't know what is going to take us. But I also need to imagine what it would look like and how much money we are likely to invest and need and then return. So that's always been a balancing act. But I think we've got quite, quite used to that. It was very important as well from the very beginning that the Chief Information Officer and I divided our role and responsibilities. He's never commented on my marketing decisions and I've never commented on his technology decisions. We've always exchanged opinions on a professional level, but I have always respected and I used to do his professional knowledge on his area and he's done the same about mine, and it's the same with the teams. So again, it was very, very important from the very beginning to set this scope. Set the foundation said that a role and responsibilities and in our case to decide that we were going to use Agile. That's my fourth lesson by design Agile. We were also empowered, empowering the team. Every person in the team has expertise in something that somebody else doesn't have, and I have learned tons from the team and something that I've done quite regularly is then asking the team to come on, explain to me as a non-expert what they're doing. So they say, what team would come on the same team? And then we took it on the technology and the to them. And I have learned a lot and I respect them. And I think from the very first moment they felt empowered and used a different way of working that what they had experienced before. The Agile approach is something that has come to stay. In fact, it's been just as an example in the organization and as I said, clear roles and responsibilities, always respecting each person's experience and expertise regarding the governance. And nobody had spoken about web governance before and the university. So I also had to explain what governance meant. And I did a lot of searching as well on my previous university when I worked in the UK, I was the head of the Italy system. A really good friend and colleague of mine tell me a lot on that because they had already gone through this, through this route and similarly they Chief Information Officer said was my current institution, this one that has been selected for the from the very first woman had promoted a way of governance as well for all our technical technology decisions. So I proposed a hybrid between would we had a body in place on the technology side and would I have seen in my previous institution we defined governance as a group of roles, protocols and procedures to maintain and optimize the website throughout time to allow us to meet our strategic objectives. So that meant defining what the website was, what its mission, what its objectives were, identifying the audiences, the information needs, the motivations, the team responsible and accountable for the website, protocols, everything. And that has taken us two years and we actually published our policy on our website and this email will now in the middle of days there was an important decision taken, which was. To. Migrate the accountability and responsibility of the whole of the website to myself. When I started this project and when I joined the university, as I said, part of the website was managed by marketing and the other part was managed by consent, and the rest nobody knew. And I started this project when I only had responsibility and accountability for one part of it, which was the. Marketing part. Which was all. Our. Information about our education programs. As the board realized that there was a clear strategy behind and a clear alignment between technology and I, they also realized that probably I was or my role was the one that could make this change and that it would be very difficult to implement this project if we had separate teams responsible for the same thing. So in January 2021, I think it was the team that was responsible for the website, for the institutional website was migrated to my team, but to be completely honest with you, that only meant one editor. So we had one editor to do everything. We the first thing that we did was do a map. Of. What sections we had on the website and who we thought was responsible. And we also introduced the definition of an information on it, a content on it, and a content editor meaning information on it. If I give you an example in the research pages, for example, the information on that might be the director of the data center who decides what was the key messages that we wanted to to translate? What are the key things that makes us different? But he or she would not be the person that actually looks at how to present that content. So that is an intermediary, if you like. That is has the role of content on it. And then there is a technical role which is the actual editor that goes in and updates everything, all the information and uses the system. We are still in the process of implementing this in some cases has been very clear. Like for example, in our course pages where Jocelyn, the academic director of the program, is the information on it, this a marketing officer to place the content on it. And there is a web editor that is the content editor now that areas is not that clear. So we did that. We are responsible at this map. We explain what the different roles were and what the interactions would be. We did some tests with some protocols and processes, so if I want to update that, who would take that decision, etc.? And we set up two boards of two committees, a strategic board that was directly delegated from the Board of directors when we from the project took all the difficult risk. And. Investment decisions that I didn't and cost accountability to decide just by myself. So one thing that we did was making sure that that is to take board wasn't led by me officially by but one of the deputy vice chancellors, and therefore my role was to be there as an expert. And. The web director, and that my roommate, who is the project manager, was the one preparing the work, preparing the presentation and reporting. And then we had an operational committee that was doing all the day to day checking, sharing, etc. and we started on doing audience research with prospective students, alumni, academics, employees and other stakeholders. This is in Catalan, but I just wanted to show you that in every single presentation that we did, we had a very clear map of the different stages that we wanted to follow for each of the pillars, the governance, the tools and the content. So my. My. Next lesson is, in our experience, we realized with only one extra editor that we couldn't centralize everything. We didn't have capacity for it, and therefore we needed to delegate and distribute the rights and responsibilities across the organization, what we call a distributed governance. And that's that's what we did. Regarding the Tools session, I think that the team led the first thing that they did was working with an external provider to identify, to understand all our business needs, which my team had identified, and then translate that into technological requirements. What I mean is that we needed to increase in efficiency functionality. The. User experience. We needed to reduce the risk of obsolescence, and we needed to simplify the use of multiple CMC, study them to come on themselves. But other than that, I really passed it on to the I2 team and I said, Now please help me. So they did this a study on after a long process of almost a year of first analyzing what we needed, then doing the market research of what solutions were possible, and then having to go through all the process of a procurement exercise. We ended with Adobe as our data experience platform and I wanted to share with you. A couple of weeks ago I went to London to the Adobe summit. And I'm. One of the few things that are relevant here that I wanted to share is, first of all, technology can help you in days in those projects and there are a lot of options out there. So make sure that you take your time to choose the right one. Artificial intelligence is changing. Everything is changing processes, is changing the pace of everything. We're talking about website here, but it's actually changing all the processes. Good job profiles, ways of working and and now with that technology, there is no excuse for not having creativity and there is no excuse for not meeting the audiences. Respect patience. So you really need to work with technology, whichever platform it is. And we think we get to knowledge team to really understand what. You could do. Again, in everything, the presentation to the board, I had this mob saying, This is what we planning and this is what we are. They could visualize it very clearly. And so could the team. I've shared with you the lessons, but take your time to identify your business needs. Explore the opportunities that the different platforms may offer you. The ambition, but at the same time, be realistic because there's lots of things that technology offers you but you might never needed, or it might just give you a very, very small return on investment and can see that your project implications. And finally, the third foundation was continuous ability. And as they said, there was no established current culture in our team of best practice. There were pockets of excellence, I have to say, and really good gems of people that we found throughout the process. But there wasn't a strategy of what content design or use that experience of say, Oh, sorry, CEOs, etc. So from the very beginning we work with them as a small agency that really what I wanted to embed in to our team. But we've had a lot of difficulties. Sometimes they couldn't work at the same pace that we wanted them to. Sometimes we didn't work at the pace that they wanted us to. There was a lot of change in staff, so it hasn't been easy. But but we've tried and we wouldn't have been able to do this without them because we decided to work with an external agency because they have the expertise in all of that, but always with the objective of them helping us to learn and then embedding this ongoing best practice and upskilling of the team. From the very first moment we decided to use the use of standard approach. So every decision would. Be backed. By data and a question of what does the use that want put us to use or to meet. And this is actually in our policy and it's implied a huge change of culture because initially was, here's the content to publish it and you would get a long list of copy and now what are we trying to do is what does your audience need? Let's see, let's see how we can help you. I noticed a super important reporter with a brand team to update our use of our brand digitally. Again, the map and therefore my seventh lesson Be ambitious and never compromise for your audience needs and wants. You know, this is this is the present and this is the future. And you must, must, must always follow best practice in web content design and just that experience. That's. The future and that's the press and that's what our audience wants. And if you do that, you can prove much better return on investment. And. Work again on Our dad has had its difficulties and its challenges. For example, we've changed the calendar and the priorities depending on business needs. At some point our old world WordPress just kept having problems and we had initially planned to migrate it later on in the project, but we had to change it within a month and we needed to migrate it quickly. So we had to do that and as a result we had to. Move. Other parts of the project to later on. We've also had a change of Vice Chancellor in the middle of the project and a change of priorities. So our calendar is always adapting to business needs and that sometimes has been challenging with the team, but the team in general has adapted much better than our to stakeholders. As I mentioned before, you cannot you cannot always ready your resource needs. But then looking at the board and the finance director, you always have to justify and make your your projections. We we've learned from dividing the project into a smaller part. We've never said this is what the website is going to look like. We've always said this is what those are, the plans that we've identified. This is the methodology that we're going to use. Let's see what he takes. And then we've also had to balance the business as usual of maintaining the website. With. Quick wins to make some visible points and gain brownie points, if you like, from everyone. And then the transformation project always following the Agile methodology and the philosophy of best released revised plan and improve. This is our kind of legacy that it was in 2020. Within 23 last April, we went live with all our education sector sections and that was more than 700 programs. Individual program pages, because we had three languages plus everything else that that came with it. Any, any website you won't find. We've suffered a drop in. Our. CEO position which we expected by we recovering on and so far it's going well. So but we had for it, we had to postpone this two weeks from the date when we initially thought we were going to go live because there was a change in the date. What it would mean Vice chancellor was taking our officially head role. So again, another example of how we we've had to adapt. So be prepared to adapt, always justify the response and introducing quick visible wins to keep your stakeholders interested and engaged. And last, I just wanted to share with you some screenshots of what it looked before and what it looks now, considering that we still have at least another year, probably two years of the project. But you can see on the left that we had a very tech heavy website now with simplifies based way far into these different colors and the patterns to help with use that experience. We didn't used to have images in color actually we we were able to use them. Now we've changed the menu, the navigation. We've regrouped all our navigation architecture. We've made it mobile first. So if we can just sit in across all platforms, which before was very difficult and, and the one thing that we trying to work and now it's allowed me to expand but that's it that's all for me. This does go to my contact details, my email and my LinkedIn on the website as I said, all done with as a whole with as we we haven't seen as a project. Did. But I hope this has been interesting and helpful to anybody else as much as it was for me to do a round of conversations with experts that had done the same project before me. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much. And for those of you on the chat life, I encourage you to type in any questions via the Cuban box. And we do have a few that are coming through right now. The first that was asked I was about the presentation slides and we will be posting those by the end of the day today. So you'll be able to have those as a resource following the session. And then then as we have a question from the audience, which is what tools do you use for content collaboration. Everything on Adobe, we've basically gone from having multiple platforms as you so to realizing all the possibilities that Adobe gave us. We still have some content on WordPress, but basically choosing a digital experience platform they dxp instead of does a content management system allows us to integrate everything instead of integrating with our CRM, which is Salesforce, and it allows us to integrate everything with all our social media channels. And also we now are starting our project with our internal website as well. But yeah, everything we've we've made a strategic decision to optimize all the possibilities that Adobe gives us right now, and we still don't know everything that can be possible, to be honest. And I was. Well. That's why we went to the conference. They chief I.T. Officer and I last week or two weeks ago in London, and we just came back thinking, Oh my God, there's so much more we can do. But yeah, we do everything with Adobe in Salesforce at the moment. We we're going to the next question, and this one was also upvoted. Did you have a separate communication plan to show progress and to keep people informed? Yes, we did. Yes, absolutely. I should have put that, actually. Yes. We work very closely with the internal communications team and we we've been releasing new SIM finally as we had big milestones. I also kept the board up to date from the board, all the directors committees, if you like, and in and which are the presentations with everybody. And also we did a lot of working with the team. So I did a round of conversations and a number of occasions with different teams and with the academics, with the research centers. So a lot of communications, both formal communication and also informal. And some of them I did them myself, some of them was with the Chief I.t officer, some of them the project team. So yes, and we had a plan and it's an ongoing plan. Yes, definitely. Maybe we can give it another second to wait for my questions to come through. But again, the link is not currently posted for the slides, but they will be posted at the end of the day today. I think. My. Reflection as well of what shared with other colleagues to study, certainly usually those projects entail either changing the content, either changing the platform. Or. Updating your brand. Or. Improving your content. And what is different about our approach is that we did everything at the same time and we did everything at the same time because we had no option. And I think that's been hugely complex. But equally reward then. But this I. If I had chosen if I had had the opportunity to choose, I probably wouldn't have done everything at the same time. But we had no time. Right. And our next question is how many different platforms did you review? Oh, gosh. At least 20 or 30 at the very least. But I didn't do it. The I.T team did with a consultant, so we couldn't then choose because we need to follow European procurement laws so we could then say this is the platform that we want and we need to go and buy it. And what we did is we did that research to understand what was possible and then we published. I would put out our public tender knowing what possibilities the solution could give us and what of those solutions we needed as a business. But yes, at least 20. They spent six months doing this, so it quite a thorough exercise. I think those are the questions that we have that have come through the Q&A box. But thank you so much for joining us and it's wonderful hearing from you. For those of you who are on the platform, we're going to take about a 20 minute break and your next set of sessions will start at the top of the hour. So have a great day, everyone. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

web transformation project

user experience

business strategy

digital experience platform

customer relationship management

collaboration

web content design