Case study: Lancaster University Management School

Lancaster University Management School (LUMS) is the premier business school in the North of England, one of the top business schools in the UK, and one of only 2 schools to have been awarded the UK government’s top rating of 6-star for the quality of its research. Founded in 1964, LUMS teaches and researches the full range of management subjects. The school works closely with corporate clients, running tailored leadership, executive and project management programmes for organisations such as BAE systems, Total Oil, the NHS and British Airways.

The LUMS website amounts to around 2000 pages. The content is primarily academic, with descriptions of each department within the school, the undergraduate, postgraduate, executive and research programmes available, information about faculty research interests, lists of publications produced by faculty and downloadable research papers. There are also sections aimed at employers interested in recruiting LUMS students, including a sophisticated online CV system that employers can use to recruit students.

Identifying the clients' need

Like many university faculties, LUMS was an early adopter of the internet and by 2001 their website had grown to a very large size, but was becoming increasingly difficult to manage. Keen staff with an interest in web design had built their own pages with their own non-standard designs, while some departments had sub-contracted design and maintenance work to professional firms who often produced well presented pages that were difficult for staff to maintain. By 2002 LUMS had a site with inconsistent - and at times confusing - navigation, very diverse in visual appearance and a struggle to maintain. The way the site was structured reflected their own organisational structure, but did not meet the needs of site visitors.

LUMS is made up of 7 main academic departments, each with their own ethos and traditions, and often a desire to write their own content, rather than have everything produced centrally. Lacking an in-house web development team, they needed to sub-contract the technical work, yet wanted the ability to create, edit and manage all the content themselves.

LUMS chose Incutio’s proposal for a number of reasons: our content management system was not an off-the-peg solution, but a product that would be closely tailored to their needs. LUMS felt that Incutio’s staff understood the business they were in – academia. They were impressed by Incutio’s technical expertise and our understanding of – and commitment to – web standards and accessibility issues. Above all, Incutio’s staff came across as responsive and flexible. LUMS felt that we were people they could work with.

Solving the problem

During the implementation phase of the project Incutio worked closely with LUMS, with daily phone calls and meetings every few weeks to discuss the issues arising from the deployment of Fabric. LUMS now uses Incutio's content management system to power the entire site. Through Fabric, user and group permissions are set up and managed - allowing precise control of which users can view, edit and manage particular parts of the site. All pages are created and managed through Fabric.

Since LUMS went live with their new site in June 2002, Incutio have built a number of additional platforms and technologies for them. These have included an online CV system that allows students and alumni to create CVs in a standard format and display them on the site. An impressive feature of the system is that it generates high-quality PDF versions of each CV on the fly – perfect for printed output. Despite limited advertising to recruiters, the system has proved successful in generating contacts and interviews for students.

Incutio have also built the front-end of a sophisticated publications display system which LUMS use for the search and display of academic research papers. We are currently working with LUMS to build improved systems for handling data on staff at the School and an associated directory of research expertise. A significant benefit with all these systems is the extent to which web administrators at LUMS can manage the structural elements of the technology. Thus with their CV system they can define the fields and the search criteria themselves – they are not hard-coded into the system. This flexibility has meant that LUMS can roll out the system easily to new groups of students, yet present their CVs, and the way they are searched, in different ways.

The benefits to the client

The most obvious benefit is that traffic roughly doubled one year after launching the new site. The site now presents a consistent image across all pages, reinforcing LUMS branding. Easy-to-use news and events modules mean that they are always adding topical material to the site – dynamic content on the home and news pages changes very regularly. Devolved authorship has worked well. Individual web authors in departments now find it easy to manage their own pages without experiencing the difficult technical issues which were a daily part of life when managing the old site. The fact that Fabric is simple in use means that authors keep their pages up-to-date. Content management and creation can also be delegated to non-technical staff, each of whom can manage their content from anywhere around the world.

LUMS can now be much more confident that their pages are accurate – always a worry on a site which has over 2000 pages. Devolving content generation to staff throughout the organisation (all using Fabric) has meant that LUMS have been able to run the site employing only one full-time member of staff whose job is dedicated to managing the overall site, with obvious benefits for staff resourcing.

Testimonial

"Working on a large, complex project like ours, things are bound to go wrong from time-to-time. We’ve found that Incutio have always been responsive when it comes to fixing problems, whether these are caused by user error or by software bugs. Being able to speak directly to an expert developer or support engineer on the telephone is getting unusual these days, so it’s reassuring to know that I can pick up the phone and discuss the resolution of problems with someone who really does know their stuff – and who will fix the problem quickly. The company is expert in many web technologies – such as PHP, XHTML and CSS - and the wider aspects of accessibility which are so important in higher education these days. We have also come to trust the advice they have given us on many general web-related issues.

When we invited companies to tender for our initial business, back in 2001, we hoped that we would find a partner for our web development who would be proactive and stimulating. Incutio have continually brought ideas to us, enabling us to see new uses for our website. We've gained a lot by working with a company which is responsive when called upon to fix problems, yet full of ideas too."

Richard Evans - Web Manager, Lancaster University Management School