Implementing digital governance at Birkbeck

At Birkbeck, staff were given publishing access to the website, regardless of their skills or experience. But this approach led to a bloated website that was difficult to navigate and understand.

When we launched the Digital Transformation Project, we knew we could no longer afford to take this approach.

What I did

• I formalised new digital standards - including a house style, tone of voice guidelines, as well as guidelines on writing for the web.

• With immediate effect, I took the decision to restrict access to a targeted group of digital staff. I negotiated this with all of the heads of school and heads of professional service departments and got sign-off on this approach from the Head of Administration. 

• I introduced ‘Fixit Fridays’ - where subject matter experts were able to request minor digital amendments to improve accuracy. I would schedule them to be actioned (unless they needed further intervention) on the Friday that same week. If staff felt that this wasn't sufficient, I would open negotiations around training and permissioning.

• I developed ‘Digital Passport’ training, a series of training sessions run by the central digital content team, which was followed up by hands-on quality assurance.

• I procured a digital governance tool that would scan our website for accessibility and house style ‘fails’. Each month, I would then schedule in a session to action the errors thrown up through this scanning process.

The results

• While I was at Birkbeck, operating Fixit Friday, we had no requests for follow-up negotiations over online access.

• Moving BAU requests to Fixit Fridays freed up the team’s time to get on with the wider project portfolio.

• Using our online governance tool, we were able to target accessibility and other fails and fix them. The governance tool, which had a quality dashboard, recorded an improvement in our quality score of 20% in the first six months of operation.