New intranet for national charity CGL

CGL Intranet

CGL is a social care & health charity working throughout England & Wales with clients that are affected by drugs, alcohol, crime, homelessness, domestic abuse & antisocial behaviour. It is a large & growing organisation.

Some numbers:-

  • CGL manage nearly 250 projects dotted up & down the country
  • CGL employs over 2,700 staff to support their work
  • CGL has 53,300 client contacts every day
  • The job - a Drupal intranet

CGL's Plone-based intranet had done sterling service but was creaking at the seams with the organisation's rapidly growing profile. Following cost-benefit analyses between intranet technologies such as SharePoint, CGL opted for a Drupal intranet.

This was a good move - they avoided hefty licence fees & vendor lock-in by choosing Open Source. There followed an intensive internal process of staff surveying & branding activity. Sereno was chosen to build on this work & undertook the discovery phase for of a brand new Drupal 7 intranet to help CGL meet identified goals:

  • migrate 4,600+ users from a Symfony staff database
  • migrate thousands of policy documents & other critical downloads to Drupal
  • apply strict workflow rules to these documents based on staff roles & expiry dates
  • rationalise other content (including news, events, calendaring, staff alerts), migrating existing content where necessary
  • develop a mobile-friendly, responsive theme that won't break on the staff computers' IE 8 browsers
  • make the administrative process easy & provide staff training where necessary
  • phase roll-out of the above to minimise staff disruption

A collaborative approach was needed, since CGL had an internal design team to be trained & skilled up in Drupal development & theming as part of the process. 19 distinct sprints fell out of the Discovery Phase, each sprint creating a piece of working software that would benefit the organisation straight away.

Agile & Kanban

As we moved from one sprint to the next, we used a Kanban board to keep us focussed & to promote communication.

Workflow

We collaborated with CGL's team using git version control system and Drupal's Features module to push developed code to live.

Moodle & Quality Audit Tools Integration

Sereno's new intranet moved 96% of CGL's pages onto Drupal. Some legacy tools - Learning & Development's Moodle LMS & Quality audit tools - were retained as part of the change management. Sereno built a single sign-on (SSO) solution so staff wouldn't have multiple passwords to remember. Drupal's authentication was used, and Sereno built a module to make the joins to Moodle and the audit tools seamless to the end user.

The Result

The project was delivered on time & on budget. 4,600 happy users!

Sereno have worked with CGL over many years. They have always provided high quality, flexible and creative services delivered on time and on budget.

Mike Pattinson, Executive Director