Illustration shows Digital Solutions iterative development process that is iterative vs waterfall

Building the Foundation...

Author: Elena Talanker

improving, and growing… one website at the time… for very happy customers!

Digital Solutions team is facing a tough task of migrating 60+ websites to a new Drupal platform. Our small but mighty team is well prepared to face many challenges that come with migrations. During the last two years we figured out how and when Agile methodology can be useful, established roles and achieved great results developing our processes.

One of the main principals that we are following strictly during Drupal 8 digital transformation is to build unified and stable platform for the North Carolina state government websites.

Our team is constantly questioning what could be done better in order to continually improve the platform that we are building.

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” – Albert Einstein

Core Features

We started by identifying the core features on the current Digital Commons platform and reinstating them on Drupal 8. Also taking advantage of the improvements that are offered by the new Drupal version. During migrations, we work with the website agency team on cleaning their site map, reviewing list of active users, and improving site accessibility by providing Alt tags to all the images. As a result, the agency website is cleaner and more manageable after migration. Fresh inside out!

Desires/Needs

We are building a new platform with the help of the great community of the Digital Commons website managers. Every new suggestion is vetted through the Advisory Group to understand the needs, concerns, and perspective of the people who actively manage state government websites. Share your ideas via the Desire survey on Digital Commons Support site to tell us about your agency website needs, cool ideas that you have noticed browsing other websites or your wild dreams. (September 2020 note: the webform was active for a year and has been retired.)

Next time at the “We are Digital Commons” event we will share some of your ideas that are going into development to enhance Digital Commons 2.0 platform.

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