Sketchnotes IWMW17 Carley Hollis

Tagged: Iwmw17 Iwmw Live | Posted: Wed, Jul 12, 2017 approx. 1 min read

Probably my favourite talk of the whole conference.

Starting from the basic premise that there is too much work for a central web team to do it all the team at St Andrews explained how they’ve built up their capacity by a thorough programme of standardising how they work, explaining their thinking and educating their users.

There were lots of interesting details about how they’d done all this. The development of the Digital Pattern Library as part of the wider Service Design Manual was central to defining standards and it was clear that the process of defining the standards was very helpful to the team in gaining clarity about their decisions and having a real solid foundation for decisions taken. Having a clear set of well thought out, and explained ideas then makes it easier to implement those ideas across the organisation.

The digital visa concept was one that seemed to impress everyone in the audience, not only with it’s comprehensiveness, but also the commitment to enforce it’s use.

Of particular note was the commitment to produce three blog posts every 2 week sprint, importantly, with time set aside for people to do them. I was impressed with the follow through to produce those posts, and the clear thinking that they are produced for mainly an internal audience with clear aims to support and develop the community they’ve created.

Overall, a cracking mix of overarching strategy with great examples of how to put it into practice.