The University of Waterloo faced an issue as the Registrar’s Office was trying to solve their problem of continuing to provide prospective students the ability to calculate their expenses as they migrated from Drupal 7.
Faced with a resource crunch and the task of transitioning away from Drupal 7, the team aimed not only to maintain functionality but also enhance the prospective students’ experience and by making the calculator adaptable for various university departments.
But it wasn’t a smooth journey to get there. The teams faced additional roadblocks and challenges along the way as they uncovered more work after initial quality assurance testing and UAT, requiring innovative problem-solving and collaboration.
Through persistence and strategic innovation, the team shifted from custom-tailored solutions to two contributed modules (one to fetch data from a data store and one to process calculations), significantly improving both the architecture and user interface. This collective achievement resulted in the development of valuable modules that serve both the academic divisions of Waterloo and the greater Drupal community.
In this session, you will explore our story, discover the obstacles we tackled, and learn from the insights that have driven us toward creating sustainable, reusable solutions.
Joe Kwan
Manager, Web Development, University of Waterloo
Joe Kwan has over 20 years of experience in the web development industry. He has held multiple leadership roles in product development, UX research and design, and management consulting. Joe is currently the Manager, Web Development at the University of Waterloo and leads product management and development for key SaaS web products including the university’s enterprise website builder.
C.J. Pagtakhan
Digital Experience Solutions Architect, ImageX
With over two decades of digital experience, primarily as an independent consultant, C.J. has been leading and positively impacting organizational outcomes through project management, business analysis, user experience, and agile product ownership for multiple clients. He also brings digital product management experience from his time being responsible for University of Manitoba’s main website, Drupal CMS, and intranet. Currently, as a Digital Experience Solutions Architect at ImageX, C.J. looks at the business and user side of projects to identify the problems we’re solving and their solutions.