Melbourne Business School

The challenge

Melbourne Business School (MBS) is the graduate school in business and economics for the University of Melbourne, one of Australia’s highest ranked universities. Among MBS’s alumni are some of the nation’s most notable business leaders, and the institution has long held a prestigious standing in the field of executive education programs. However, MBS’s website had become outdated and had fallen out of step with its reputation.

Information was difficult for users to find and content administration had become clunky and time-consuming. MBS was also looking for a platform with powerful personalisation capabilities to take it into the future. 

After a detailed review, MBS decided to migrate the site to Sitecore. The institution engaged Luminary to deliver the website redevelopment and platform migration under an agile scrum methodology. The ultimate aim was to ensure that the final deliverable leveraged the Sitecore platform fully, incorporating a best of breed content management experience, and allowing the MBS team to manage content with minimal IT intervention.

What we did

One of the key objectives of the project was to produce an MVP website running on Sitecore in as short a timeframe as possible. As such, the Luminary team worked to deliver value early and often, with frequent releases and a continuous feedback loop with MBS via daily standups. The process began with a roadmapping session to set out the key features and the order of delivery. 

Optimising Sitecore

Throughout the project there has been a focus on laying the foundations to harness the full capabilities of Sitecore. 

This included a two-part workshop on Sitecore Experience Analytics. Together with Luminary, the MBS team assigned positions and weights to all of the website’s conversion points – for example, brochure downloads, form completions and enquiries – in line with the Sitecore Engagement Value Scale. These weightings provide the basis for analysing the site’s ongoing performance. 

The other main aspect of maximising MBS’s investment in Sitecore has been the setting up of data recording that will ultimately be used to personalise the end-user experience, for example demographic information and behavioural data.

Streamlining content administration

Templates and widgets have been used throughout the site to streamline new content creation. The new site also features much deeper integration between the CMS and the CRM, which has alleviated the need for content administrators to duplicate information such as contact details when people attend an information session or register for an event. 

The result

The new site offers a much more efficient content administration process, saving countless hours for the MBS team and allowing them to have far greater self-sufficiency. More powerful analytics will also offer the team much better visibility of how the site is performing, enabling them to continually optimise it to achieve their business objectives. Further, with the site now recording valuable information about user characteristics and behaviour, MBS is now in a prime position to capitalise on Sitecore’s powerful personalisation capabilities.