Upgrading Your Company’s Drupal Website? It’s Easy If You Do It Smart!
Just received that email from your CEO tasking you with upgrading the company’s website to Drupal 8?
I’ll show you why it’s actually a blessing in disguise and the reasons why you shouldn’t fear the ‘big’ project!
It’s actually not that scary if you follow some simple steps.
How do you make sure not to forget all the functionality and features you need?
I’ve been involved in many website upgrade projects and been on the receiving end of many quote requests for these kind of projects.
As an agency one of the challenging parts of a project like this is the unknowns.
Knowing exactly
- how the current site works now, and
- how the client is expecting the site to work post upgrade
As a customer it’s hard for the same reason — the unknowns!
- You’ve probably never worked with the agency before so how do you know they’re the right one?
- The agency is probably asking you for a ‘spec’ so how do you make sure you get all the features you want? How do you know what they need in a spec or how to write it so they understand you? Or more importantly that the agency build it to work how you need?
There are two reasons I often see going wrong;
- Not enough time spent on discovery or understanding the project at the start, and
- The brief being too technical and task based.
So if you’re a marketing manager and you’ve been tasked with the upgrade one of the keys to success is in communicating what you want and expect from the new platform in a non technical way — focus on the ways that people want to use your platform (user stories). Don’t tell the agency how to build it, tell them how you and your customer expect to use it.
At the end of the day websites are about people; the customers who use your website on the front end, your internal team that manage the day to day content of the website and the people or stakeholders who own the website.
It’s about building the website for ‘people’ so don’t get drawn into how you want the website to be built ‘technically’.
“25 percent of web projects fail. These findings are consistent with studies of larger IT initiatives showing failure rates of 30%-70%.” — Michael Krigsman, Founder cxotalk.com
So how do you make sure you’re not one of the 30% that fail?
Let’s go back to the 2 reasons I often see causing projects to fail — the first being not enough time in the discovery phases when a company is choosing an agency to help with their website upgrade.
We’ve compiled a 13 point checklist to work through as you commence a Drupal upgrade.
