Case Study
England’s Leeds City Council achieves website development release velocity of 85% with modern DevOps infrastructure from UST
CLIENT
Leeds City Council is the local government authority of the City of Leeds in West Yorkshire, England. Although the city was chartered by King Charles I in 1626 as a free borough, the modern city council was established in 1974. Today, Leeds has approximately 800,000 residents.
CHALLENGE
Needed to modernize outdated website document storage platform and underlying infrastructure
The Leeds City Council embarked on a digital transformation effort to modernize a footprint of more than 120 websites to improve user experiences. As a first step, the council’s IT team needed to migrate the website’s SharePoint 2013 document storage solution to a more modern technology because its SharePoint application was at its end of life. The IT team planned to replace SharePoint 2013 with Drupal 10, an open source application to manage and publish website content, in an AWS Cloud web hosting environment. The City Council needed an experienced web development partner to successfully guide the project.
TRANSFORMATION
Deployed modern infrastructure to support consistent, scalable websites
UST conducted a thorough assessment of Leeds City Council’s websites and underlying infrastructure and developed a modernization plan. Following an Agile project management approach, UST prioritized the sites for migration and deployed Drupal 10 on AWS, Azure DevOps pipelines and Docker, a container management and imaging platform. With the new DevOps platform in place, the City Council’s web development team had automated website deployment pipelines to facilitate smooth and efficient releases into production, including testing, integrations, and deployment, reducing manual interventions and minimizing errors. The Drupal Distributable functionality enabled the Council’s web team to a maintain consistent design and formatting across all sites.
IMPACT
Provided seamless digital experience to local community
The strategic approach automated web development and contributed to an average release velocity of 85%. In just four months, the development team migrated two sites, created more than 120 Drupal pages and implemented at least 85 website enhancements. Leed’s City Council accelerated release cycles and delivered more reliable functionality, creating a seamless digital experience for residents.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/en/what-we-do/experience-design