In LTW we meet in person twice yearly for LTW All Staff meetings and our summer gathering this year takes place next week at the recently opened Bessie Watson Lecture Theatre at the Outreach Centre. There will presentations from colleagues, group exercises and snacks.
Every 6 months I ask each of the LTW Heads to send me their list of team achievements, so if you think they might have missed any, now is the time to remind them.
As I read through their lists this time I am struck by how much time we spend on procurements, replacements and migrations as technology changes. Some of our funding comes from capital pots, which might usually be used for buildings. But technology changes much faster than buildings and we have a rolling 5-10 year plan to replace platforms and technologies as ( or before) they go out of date.
It takes an enormous amount of work it takes to move from one platform to another.
If colleagues suggest we should get a new VLE, or a new portal or a new media asset management platform it is a huge amount of work and sometimes it feels like there is very little gain. Migrations and replacement projects seem often to be replacing like with like. So it is important to be able to identify the benefits which we will see, improvements in managing, keeping up to data and mitigation against risk. Risks in LTW are risks for the whole institution. If we don’t have up to date robust systems, learning teaching and the student experience will suffer.
Never underestimate how much work a procurement, replacement or migration can be. But no one will thank you for it. It is the hidden labour behind the fancy new tools colleagues and students demand.
I have spoken much about the upgrade and migration work required for Learn Ultra.
We’ve have also moved away from QMP on-Premise to the Cloud – Karen H estimates this was the longest upgrade project we’ve ever had. Early next year for complete decommissioning of the on-premise system and then we’ll have our celebration.
Our largest migration on going is a huge move of the entire University website (1.5 million pages) from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. Of those 1.5 million pages I’d estimate around five of them were the same, so the work to automate this lift and shift at scale while building a new platform in flight has been a huge undertaking. Perhaps we were naive fools even to try.
We have new colleagues in our website migration project team. we have worked hard to find creative technical solutions and to keep colleagues with us through the move. We introduced more resource and optimised our processes and engagement. Current migration count is 75 completed, 86 still to go, almost 50%. EdWeb to Web Publishing Platform migrations | Website and Communications
By the next LTW All Staff in December, all the migrations will be completed. And Stratos and I are looking for a date for the ‘end of migrations’ party.
That will be a well-deserved celebration.
