SAVING THE WEBSITE OF WORLD HEALTH

Chris StrebelChris StrebelChris Strebel

All women and girls – rich or poor, urban or rural, educated or illiterate – must be able to access health services equally.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus , Director-General WHO

Slide

THE CLIENT

World Health Organization

THE TASK

Migration of 180,000 webpages onto new CMS, design & infrastructure

THEIR STORY

Health for all

Used Skills

Project Management
Content Migration
Budget Management
Fundraising

About Project

After 15 years on the same CMS, who.int (one of the worlds most important website) was deteriorating; suffering multiple downtimes, sluggish performance, and providing an overall poor user experience to those persons and governments that accessed it. This called the need to upgrade and migrate it onto to a more modern and fit for purpose CMS. After a formal RFP process, Sitefinity was the chosen CMS. Such project of this scale and importance required help to raise and manage the $4.8 million USD budget needed for the revamp project. In addition, with WHO staff at full capacity, I had to hire and lead the team of 15 consultants to migrate the 180,000 pages onto the new CMS, IA & design. As well as that, with 100s of editors publishing content every 90 seconds, and unique visitors reaching 1.4 billion in 2020 alone, we worked with Microsoft to migrate the entire website’s infrastructure onto the Azure Cloud to ensure the latest health information was being provided to the world, with no downtime! This was an amazing project to have been part of, made even more interesting to have carried out during COVID-19!

What ANOOP Did

  • Raised and managed $4.8 million USD budget for who.int revamp project
  • Hired and led team of 15+ consultants to migrate 180,000 pages onto new CMS, IA & design
  • Relaunched new WHO app to help inform public of latest COVID-19 info
  • Scrum master of AWS to Azure IaaS infrastructure migration
  • Worked across departments, regions & senior leadership teams
  • Managed multiple onsite, near shore and off shore vendors

Project Highlights

RAISED & MANAGED $4.8 MILLION PROJECT BUDGET

Having worked on similar scaled projects, I estimated the cost of the project and then worked with WHO stakeholders to create a compelling business case to justify the reasoning for the multi-million dollar project. This business case was put forward to WHO’s Global IT Fund, and thankfully approved. Over the 3.5 years, this budget was tightly managed, with all anticipated costs falling into range of the initial estimate.

HIRED & LED TEAM OF 15 CONSULTANTS

As there was not much capacity in- house to carry out the migration, as the project manager I had to find resources that would. This led me to personally search for and hire multiple consultants, as well as run a number of official RFPs that on-boarded leading vendors that would assist us design the new IA and UX of who.int, as well as provide the “hands to keyboard” support to migrate the content of the 180,000 webpages.

CONTENT MIGRATION

Having the right team in place, we worked relentless with relevant WHO stakeholders to migrate content from the 180,000 pages. This was prioritised in order of importance to the public based on analytics. As old content was migrated, those previous parts of the old CMS were shut down. Content was continually assessed to see if it was still up to dates and in many cases content was adjusted so it would fit the new IA and UX. Generic content was automatically scraped and tagged appropriately. All in all, over 100 websites across the WHO ecosystem (3 regions, 74 countries and multiple partnerships) were migrated!

AWS TO AZURE INFRASTRUCTURE MIGRATION

During the pandemic, the website received traffic in excess of 1 million visits a day. That, combined with the 100s of content editors publishing content every 90 second meant the website was under immense pressure to stay up and working. Microsoft noticed that the website was sitting on a sub-par infrastructure, and offered to work with the WHO website project team to create a state of the art system that would maintain 0% content-authoring downtime,100% CI/CD automation and 100% automation towards multi-channel content-delivery. Over 5 months, I worked as the scrum master to lead the team of engineers across Microsoft. Progress and WHO to migrate and delivery the website infrastructure from AWS to the Azure cloud.

What It Took

3.5

Years

20

Kilos

Visit the New WHO Website

What They Say About Working With ANOOP

Bernardo Mariano Junior

Chief Information Technology Officer at United Nations
“Anoop is a great asset to any organization requiring a dedicated and performing staff. Anoop’s work at World Health Organization (W.H.O.) focused in managing a complex web migration project that involved multiple internal stakeholders to implement the migration of W.H.O. web content from a legacy platform and a more modern platform. The project included the establishment of a new web content governance and new capabilities that enhanced the quality and quantity of the organization’s web content. Thanks to his extensive experience in project management, his result orientation, team work and communication skills, Anoop was instrumental to the success of this project. Therefore I recommend him to any organiization or company in need of a skilful project manager.”

Chris Strebel

Manager Digital Content eXperience Team (DCX) at World Health Organization
Anoop did a stellar job for WHO as the Senior Project Manager for the WHO Web Transformation Project. I worked closely with Anoop over the 3.5 years of the project, and he was a catalysing force driving us to achieve a new Digital Experience Platform.

It is a massive achievement to PM the move one of the largest, most complex international websites in the world. It is all the more impressive when one considers this was done during #covidー19 when the website traffic went viral with1.3 billion visits (for 2020), a 700% increase. To ensure the website was not crushed by the weight of this new traffic Anoop worked closely Project Managing a team from Microsoft and the internal WHO servers’ team to move the WHO web architecture to the Azure Cloud.

Anoop positivity, results driven attitude and ability to work across diverse teams was key to the success of this project. As a result, I highly recommend him for any organization thinking of embarking on a digital transformation project.


 

 

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