I-TECH Drupal 7 Upgrade

About I-TECH

The International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH) is a center in the University of Washington's Department of Global Health.  I-TECH headquarters in Seattle with teams spread across the world.  These teams work diligently to improve development of skilled medical workers and health delivery systems.

The Project

We initially built an online based intranet for I-TECH and in this 2012 project we took their initial work and upgraded to Drupal 7 alongside drastic changes to interface and user experience to streamline the activities they have discovered are most useful organizationally.  Additionally, the new version added new functionality for expanded tracking of grant acquisition.

The intranet's primary function is to provide a centralized communication hub for teams' development plans.  Teams are frequently separated by significant geography from each other and, naturally, from the central office here in Seattle.  The tool supports detailed plans that provide guidance of both macro and micro goals in each region and then supports quarterly updates to track progress and identify problem areas.  That tracking information is also useful evidence for the grants team as they work to secure further funding and complete the reporting requirements of current grants. 

Customization

Along with Drupal 7's offering we integrated our own customization to this project based on previous work and I-TECH's needs.  The current system is inspired in some ways by how Open Atrium functioned with Drupal 6, but at the end of the day is a purely custom installation profile created with Drupal 7 Core, several community contributed modules, and some purely custom modules.

Timeline

The upgrade took 5 months from start to first fully functional prototype; this project did include an early piece, the new grants management component that was up and functional in just a few weeks.  The timeline for the core project enjoyed a later target date and we used that time to significantly refine the experience. 

If a customized intranet solution is what you need for your organization, lets talk!

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