The Jewish Chronicle

Project Overview

In early 2015 I was approached to work with The Jewish Chronicle on a digital transformation project. Their website was an extremely dated Drupal build, that looked tired and was inflexible and limited in its publishing capabilities. They wanted to invest in a state-of-the-art publishing system and related services, to power both their print and online offerings. I was brought in to research and recommend suppliers and systems as part of a broader digital and print strategy that would enable them to expand their offering and increase revenues.

Initially this required understanding the history and processes currently employed by The Jewish Chronicle and a broad gap analysis. I spent time working with various colleagues and connections at The Guardian and The Times to understand best practice in the print industry from very different organisations in terms of their approaches to the challenges of digital and how this complements the traditional print aspects of their businesses. The outputs from this formed the basis of the digital strategy and key requirements for the new systems in terms of processes, workflows, design considerations and user experience.

Stakeholder engagement and broad employee buy-in was key to making this part of the process a success as it would require significant changes to the day-to-day working of the organisation after the transformation process was complete. I led the project, including defining the key decision criteria, identifying suitable suppliers and guiding the decision-making process on the provider of the digital and print publishing platforms, customer intelligence management system, design/UX agency choice, email marketing platform and advertising networks.

Supplier and partner decisions were completed in September 2015, within defined budgets and briefs. I completed project planning for the discovery workshops before leaving the project in the hands of internal staff within the Jewish Chronicle.