How the Association of National Park Authorities is Increasing the Capability and Efficiency of its Websites with Shared Services and Squiz

Download the ANPA Case Study (PDF)

The Organisation - Sharing Services & Resources

There are 15 National Parks in the UK - stretching from Dartmoor in the south west of England, to Cairngorms in northern Scotland. Each National Park is a protected area of the countryside, deemed to have particularly special cultural and wildlife significance, and each is managed by its own 'National Park Authority'.

The Association of National Park Authorities (ANPA) works with each individual authority to raise the profile of the Parks and to help promote joint working. ANPA encourages the Parks to share services, knowledge, and resources with one another. National Parks are funded by central government, and a large part of ANPA's work centres around helping parks to cut costs and increase efficiencies. This has become especially important as the government's austerity measures have begun to take effect, with ANPA needing to achieve even more savings than ever before.

As a result, the Parks have been looking to increase the return from their IT and web spend. ANPA have been working hard with each Park to improve how this budget is allocated. Each Park has its own website, and whilst this independence is important, ANPA felt that the sites could be made more efficient by moving them on to a common platform and sharing services.

Charlotte Westney, Portal Manager for the ANPA, is the central point of contact for the separate parks. During this project, her role initially focused on managing the vendor selection phase then developed into project managing each of the individual site rebuilds.

The Challenge - Multiple Stakeholders & Diverse Requirements

The key objectives of this project were to use shared services to improve the separate Park websites, whilst at the same time delivering financial and operational efficiencies. In this context, shared services meant:

• Implementing a common technology platform across all of the National Park websites.
• Creating a common feature set available to all Parks for use on their websites.
• Maintaining the independence of the Park sites, and utilising shared features and development where relevant.
• Delivering training and encouraging knowledge transfer between stakeholders across the Parks.

One of the challenges of the project was enabling each Park to benefit from the common platform and knowledge sharing, whilst still accommodating individual differences. Many of the sites shared similar requirements, but each also had specific needs which needed to be taken into account.

Some sites were in need of new functionality, others required a new graphic design or fresh content, whilst some needed integration with external systems or databases. In order to fully understand the nuances of each site, a dedicated requirements gathering phase was conducted with each Park.

These site specific requirements were complicated further by the different groups of users that would be updating and maintaining the sites. To fully understand the different types of users, ANPA created three distinct personas, and validated requirements against each one. The three groups were:

• Content Editors - These users are general staff. They have no technical skills, so when they need to update or add content to the site, they need to be able to do it quickly and easily.
• Web Editor - Web editors are more technical, but still carry out most of their work through a system interface. Their focus is on content and usability.
• System Developer - This user is very technical and needs full access to the system to be able to write custom code and integrate external systems as needed.

ANPA were looking for a single CMS that could address the diverse requirements of all of the sites and users, whilst preserving the benefits of a shared services approach. They also considered the overall cost of ownership, not just the initial license or project costs, and were keen to work with a partner that would match their passion and thirst for innovation.

The Solution - Supported Open Source

ANPA evaluated a wide number of solution providers. Rather than invite traditional tenders, vendors were invited to demo their products to the ANPA project team. The top three were then invited to the Peak District to undergo a rigorous day of further demos, scrutiny, and questioning by stakeholders. Charlotte explains why Squiz was the successful vendor:

“Squiz Matrix simply bowled everyone over. The out of the box feature set was very impressive. Most importantly to us, and unlike rivals like Drupal, Squiz could offer us the support we needed as well as an open source model. We got the best of both worlds.

I was keen for the Parks to be involved in the selection process, to generate buy-in from the beginning of the project. When it came to voting, every single representative went for Squiz. It was a unanimous verdict.”

Squiz Matrix found favour with the diverse audience ANPA needed to please. General staff and web editors were able to achieve 99% of their tasks using the wide range of out of the box features. Developers could, at the same time, take complete control of the code when they needed to. Charlotte felt the power and usability of the standard feature set was an important factor in selecting Squiz Matrix:

“Web editors were instantly attracted to the power of the out of the box features. The ease of use of Squiz Matrix, especially for these users, was very important to us.”

Squiz also fully supported the shared services approach. Features could be developed for one site, and easily shared with others when it made sense to do so. For example, the format of events information was standardised across the various sites. The development work only needed to be completed once, and could then be re-used on all the sites. This also had the added benefit of creating a consistent experience for site visitors.

Another significant element of the solution was migration of existing content. Many of the sites originally ran on LiveLink (now OpenText) and shared a similar structure and feature set. Squiz developed several migration scripts that exported the existing LiveLink content as XML data. A custom written component, developed by Squiz, then imported this XML into the newly created sites and mapped the content appropriately. These scripts were shared amongst multiple sites, spreading the cost and reducing duplication of work.

Squiz developed a custom training course for ANPA staff. A key aim of the project was for the ANPA to bear responsibility for much of the development, once Squiz had completed the initial work. Training and skills transfer helped to support this aim, and equip staff to take on more and more responsibility as the project progressed. Charlotte felt the training worked well:

“All training sessions were carried out on real websites with real content, making the time spent very effective.”

The Result - A Solid Foundation for the Future

Six Park sites have already migrated to Squiz Matrix: Snowdonia, Dartmoor, The New Forest, The Peak District, Exmoor and The South Downs. Squiz has completed training sessions with staff, and they are now able to maintain and update the sites on an ongoing basis. Staff are also continuing to train internal users and share best practice amongst each other.

Additional sites are lined up for migration to Squiz Matrix. Northumberland will be the next site to begin development, with a further four sites in the pipeline after that. As Squiz Matrix is open source, this can be done without the need to pay additional license fees, a key benefit for Charlotte:

“Squiz Matrix fulfils our need for a cost effective web platform; we are able to roll it out to new Parks as needed without additional financial outlay.”

Beyond these plans, Charlotte already sees plenty of scope for future development work:

“Squiz have made a core feature set available to us that ensures we are using the CMS in the most effective way. We are now looking at how we can extend it to further improve the functionality we offer to our website visitors. We have a future goal to move more of our transactions and commerce onto the web, using online stores and the like. Squiz Matrix already supports this functionality, so it is ready and waiting for us when we need it.”

Most importantly of all, a productive partnership between ANPA and Squiz has been forged, providing a solid framework for the future. Charlotte sees this as a key outcome:

“The ANPA were very keen on building a long term partnership with our chosen vendor. In Squiz we feel we have found that. Squiz are supporting us every step of the way, helping our staff to support themselves.”

A Selection of the ANPA websites

Snowdonia
Dartmoor
The New Forest
The Peak District
Exmoor
The South Downs