Launch of the new NZYP website system project

I am pleased to announce that a major web project I have been working on over the past few months for the New Zealand Young Professionals Network (NZYP) has launched.

In reality it has been almost a year in the making if we factor in the initial consulting and business analysis the took place pre-project when Canterbury Young Professionals (CYP) approached me with their idea to revamp their website. Even though there is no formal NZYP organisation, the idea quickly turned into a joint venture between Auckland, Dunedin and Canterbury Young Professional Organisations (YPO's) as a collaborative project dubbed “NZYP” with the groups working together toward a common set of goals.

In my opinion exactly what should be happening more among non-profit organisations in New Zealand. More collaboration and working together as non-profit funding gets tight and many initiatives end up duplicating already existing projects out in the wild.

Seeing as all of these groups offer a very similar service delivery model it made sense to create a flexible, self-service website system that allows each region to maintain their own branding look & feel instead of redeveloping each website individually. There was also a big focus on having each region autonomously managing their own content but with the cost & time saving of common page layouts, membership/event management work-flow processes and shared server infrastructure.
We also took full advantage of connecting to social networking and membership email newsletter efforts through RSS feeds and social widgets such as Facebook’s "Like Box" in order to facilitate social sharing, engagement and member growth. This was one of the core objectives of the project from NZYP's point of view.

From the outset of the project we set out to build a website system that would scale and grow as the NZYP network did. When new regions come on-board and use the system for their regional website or if new related networking groups started up they can now take advantage of a turn-key set of web and communication technologies without the high development costs of doing it all themselves.

The website system was built on a New Zealand based Content Management System , SilverStripe CMS. SilverStripe was a natural fit for the project as while working with the YPO's during the project scoping they identified that they wanted to work with open source, support local technologies and 3rd party services wherever possible. Also with SilverStripe's ever growing and friendly developer community there was no shortage of modules, plugins and support which allowed us to complete the build of the project quickly and without re-inventing the wheel each time we needed to add a new piece of functionality to the website.

I have also been lucky enough to be invited back to present the case study and some more of the technical solutions we came up with during the project at the next SilverStripe Community Meetup happening in late October (I presented a talk on business intelligence and SilverStripe CMS earlier in the year). I am looking forward to showcasing what can be done with SilverStripe and hopefully everyone can learn a little something from our project either on the technical or project management side of things.

We started off the project with a team of 3 including myself as Project Manager and Lead Developer, Shea Dawson, an up and coming Freelance Developer (who has just recently picked up a job working at SilverStripe in Melbourne, Australia... well done Shea!) and a good friend, photographer and all-round design wizard, Simon Waterhouse. After a few earthquake related set backs (Shea and Simon are both based in Christchurch, New Zealand where earthquakes and aftershocks have been continuing for well over a year now) we flat out maintained the project schedule and delivered on budget, on time and to specification a project which is meeting and exceeding expectations for the NZYP groups.

Currently we have Canterbury (CYP) and Auckland (AYP) websites live to the public with Dunedin (DYP) to follow soon. NZYP are looking at bringing on several new YPO regional groups in the future and we hope to continue to build value and insight for the Executive Committees but more importantly I think, building value and a community for the members that the YPO's serve as well as improving relationships and fostering collaboration between the regional YPO groups themselves has made this project a great success.