Tag: sprint

Building campaign landing pages, part 2: a sprint to deliver

Posted on by Jamie Forsyth and Joshua Morris

In this second of two posts on campaign landing pages (read part one), Josh Morris (Senior Front End Developer) and Jamie Forsyth (UX/UI Designer) discuss using a sprint approach to create campaign landing pages at the University.

We brought together experts to work in a ‘sprint style’ fashion over three weeks, aiming to deliver campaign landing pages that could be built and maintained within our institutional content management system (CMS), TerminalFour Site Manager.

Our experts included marketers, external agencies, product managers, content designers, user interface/experience designers, developers and other stakeholders.

Continue reading: Building campaign landing pages, part 2: a sprint to deliver

Content sprinting – part three

Posted on by Charlotte Brewer
Fees and funding web content - show and tell
The show and tell for our latest sprint was held virtually, via Skype.

The third part of digital officer Charlotte Brewer’s series on content sprinting.

This post was actually written a while ago. We planned to release it as part of our series on ‘Content Sprinting’. Then lockdown started. Hitting the publish button fell down the list of priorities. 

Despite lockdown, and despite everyone working from home and all the challenges that has brought, we’re actually still working in exactly the same way. We’re still sprinting. We’re still doing everything we did before. Everything in this blog post remains accurate. The only difference is that all our meetings and our conversations are via Skype.  
Continue reading: Content sprinting – part three

Content sprinting – part two

Posted on by Charlotte Brewer

The second part of digital officer Charlotte Brewer’s series on content sprinting. 

In my last blog post about the sprint way of working, I introduced it as a concept and looked at how we did sprint planning. In this post, I’ll show what it’s like to do the work as part of the content team in a sprint.

Do the work 

Once the sprint planning meeting is over, we get stuck into the list of tasks.   

Each task is a specific, distinct thing that we need to do to complete the goal of the sprint. For our students’ Top Tasks sprint, these included:  

  • Draft a template invitation email 
  • Book rooms  
  • Contact an International Officer to get list of international students  
  • Email these students an invitation to a focus group 
  • Contact the Mature Student Adviser to get list of mature students  
  • Email these students an invitation to a focus group 
  • Collate a list of URLs across the website that answers students’ FAQs (spoiler: there is a lot of duplication) 

Once we finish one task, we move onto the next task. Some of these are small enough for one of us to easily complete it. Others are bigger and need us all to work on it at once. Some tasks are straightforward, while some become blocked. This is where daily stand-ups come in.   

Continue reading: Content sprinting – part two

Content sprinting – part one

Posted on by Charlotte Brewer

It’s not only software that benefits from being delivered in sprints. Digital officer Charlotte Brewer discusses the practicalities of “content sprinting”. 

Sprinting – an act or short spell of running at full speed. That’s the traditional definition. Since the times of the Ancient Greeks, the sprint has been seen as the pinnacle of the athletic world. And in the last decade or so, it’s also become popular in the world of work.  

Software teams have been taking up ‘Agile’ practices that quickly deliver lots of small but functional improvements. Sprinting is fundamental to this. Like the sporting version, sprinting involves a lot of effort over a short space of time.   

In the Digital Comms team, we’ve started to adopt this approach in the way we deliver new content. Our newly–formed content team has now completed five sprints since we started this new way of working in October. Continue reading: Content sprinting – part one