A better digital experience for residents and businesses in Camden

Following an initial, independent, discovery and design phase commissioned by Camden Council, the Authority sought a modern, flexible and scalable digital experience platform to replace their ageing public-facing website. Camden recognised that its citizens, businesses and staff could be better served and at lower transactional cost; enabling users to self-serve at times that suited them and across any device.

Council staff desired a user- friendly approach to managing content, creating micro-sites and building new digital services, without the reliance on suppliers. Camden selected Placecube to build the new web-site and web-services, leveraging our Digital Place product, which had been co-developed with Bristol City Council and built on globally leading open source technology, Liferay DXP.

• The project followed an Agile delivery framework, with Placecube and Camden staff working together as a blended team, building upon the prior discovery and design work undertaken by the council, commencing with an Alpha phase where we conducted a series of user story writing workshops to create a product backlog of functional and non-functional requirements.
• In the subsequent Implementation phase, we used an Agile Scrum approach to build out the required functionality through a series of 2-week development sprints. Project stakeholders were engaged through daily stand-ups and other Agile ceremonies and a combination of on-site and remote working.
• We used Liferay DXP (Digital Experience Platform) as the core underlying technology and accelerated delivery through the re-usable components that we had developed for Digital Place and our work with other Authorities. We also developed content migration tools to reducing the manual effort required to move content from the old site to the new site.

• Prioritised requirements included developing an integration to the Capita Pay system and extending the standard search capability by developing the ability to index any site into their website search engine. The Council use this functionality to surface their Council or and other external site pages within the main website search.
• We adopted an industry best-practice development approach throughout the project, with test automation, continuous integration, and the ability to automatically create new environments. Any custom code required was written with a high level of unit test coverage, and code was continuously checked for quality using code quality checking processes.
• Key non-functional requirements included WCAG-AA for accessibility, fully responsive mobile-ready front-end across a range of device sizes, sub-second page load times, and a high degree of security – all verified successfully prior to launch.