Consulting engagements that work: a case study with Rhodes College

Welcome to a new episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form podcast by palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s June 2016 and this is episode #5. In this episode Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by our client Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. Allison caught up with Justin at DrupalCon in New Orleans last month, and spoke with him about how his school has implemented Drupal, how we worked together, and how it’s been going since. We'll be back next Tuesday with another episode of the Secret Sauce and a new installment of our long-form interview podcast On the Air With Palantir next month, but for now subscribe to all of our episodes over on iTunes. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Welcome to On the Air with Palantir, a podcast by palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s June 2016 and this is episode #5. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today my guest is a client of ours named Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. I caught Justin at DrupalCon in New Orleans last month, and spoke with him about how his school has implemented Drupal and how it’s been going. I am here with Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. How are you? Justin McGregor [JM]: Doing well, doing well.  AM: We’re in the last legs of DrupalCon 2016, and we’re in the busy lobby of the conference hall in New Orleans. So there’s a little bit of noise behind us, but we will plow through. So tell me a bit about Rhodes College. JM: Who we are and what we do? We are a small liberal arts college nestled right in the middle of Memphis, Tennessee. If you look at a map of Memphis from above, there’s a big ring road that runs at the side, and if you throw a pin in the middle, that’s us [laughs]. We are 2000 students, roughly, 300-odd employees, traditional liberal arts curriculum covering everything from pre-law, pre-med, that sort of thing, all the way down to the study of the classics. We have a Greek and Roman studies department, and right across the quad we have people that are doing pediatric oncology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. So it’s literally all over the map. And I get to support them all [laughs]. AM: Wow. So your college is on Drupal. How did you come to choose Drupal in the beginning?  JM: I’ve personally been an open-source advocate for a very long time. I’ve been in higher ed web work for going on 16 years now, and I’ve worked with a lot of different CMSs, none of which I could really ever evangelize for. They were really good for what they were, but, you know. At my last school I had evaluated Drupal 6 early on, but our CTO was very anti-open source. But I kind of fell in love with it then, and I’m like, one day I’m going to come back, I’m going to be in the right position at the right school to do this, Years elapsed and D7 had come to be a really mature solution, and I got the job at Rhodes. We were coming off of an aged open-text solution and also Sharepoint 2010 pointing internally. Both solutions were long in the tooth and needed to be replaced, and when I came on board, I’m like, yeah, cool, let’s do this thing, but one of my caveats was, we have to give serious consideration to open source and to Drupal specifically. And so during our CMS roadshow we looked at the two leading proprietary higher ed solutions and also to Drupal vendors for hosting and DevOps. And it became clear really early on that for our use case, Drupal was the only solution. AM: Well, great. Thank you for choosing Drupal! JM: I’m glad to be here, believe me. AM: So what does your internal team look like? What’s the composition? JM: It’s largely me. I am the only developer on staff. I work in the communications department, which actually reports to the dean of admission. So from a business perspective I work for our sales team. That being said, I do have an interactive technology manager, who is my liaison