Writing Privacy

Last month, I launched perhaps my most significant professional achievement – a new study site for UCL that will cater for hundreds of thousands of prospective and current students. Two weeks later, I feared it might cost me my resignation.

I should be used to pressure-pot situations by now – in university terms, at least. I played a large part in the new University of London site (london.ac.uk) and plenty of projects for the University of Greenwich. Eventually, I overreached and ended up in hospital.

Moving to UCL in 2021, the plan was to keep a low profile and regroup, perhaps even to find a better work-life balance. And for the most part, I did. The job was the perfect fit at the right time. The team was amazing. I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do, borne out by years of experience at a recruitment university. And just as importantly, I had the autonomy to deliver it.

I had inherited a crazy 48 separate websites for the faculty. (The university had close to 750 in total at its peak.) Slowly but surely, I’d been whittling these down. Then, in 2024, the university decided to consolidate its web estate to just a small number of ‘super-sites’, starting with one per faculty. It was another piece of perfect timing. I could complete the exact strategy I had been working towards.

I was asked to be among the first to launch – in part because I’d been working towards this for a while already, and in part because I hadn’t quite been the shrinking violet I’d set out to be. I’d shared ideas and methods that I thought colleagues might benefit from and had unwittingly developed a reputation as a reformer.

On 1 April last year, Medical Sciences became just the second faculty of the university to launch its new ‘super-site’. I managed it more-or-less single-handedly, except for the help of a new Marketing Officer with a few months to go. I’d got a 6,000-webpage estate down to around 900, all under one roof. It looked great. Peer feedback was glowing.

And the extra cherry on the cake was that I had centralised the governance. Once it launched, everything on that site would be done by and through me and my officer. This new home was going to stay in the best condition.

I had everything under control, the keys to an easier life. And I went and traded them in.

Our central team needed a new Web Manager to spearhead the new ‘Study’ super-site, which would eventually hold everything relating to prospective students and our 50,000+ current student population.

How could I resist? The biggest project and challenge at the faculty was now complete. Where was the next buzz going to come from? Perhaps the biggest deal of my career to date might provide it.

So, just three months after launching a beautiful new faculty website, I moved to our central directorate. A new team, that works very differently, and more virtually. It all felt a bit alien for a while.

I inherited what was affectionately known as ‘the wild west’, with hundreds of editors and contributors. It wasn’t as visibly fragmented as the faculty, but undoubtedly messier and more unruly. I had to familiarise myself with the new estate and its stakeholders, keep that on the road, and then to work out a plan for what comes next. I got to work and set a course – it’s what I do well.

The problem was, this was several times the magnitude of the faculty project, and I’d have just a fraction of the time to deliver it. So, it was always going to be a massive test in all sorts of ways. (It’s certainly substituted some perfectionism for pragmatism.)

It meant a surreal Christmas week – a short moment of calm before January struck as stormily as expected. We onboarded a large batch of users to the new platform and tried to keep them on the straight and narrow. Some groups asked for postponement or had it recommended to them.

The closer we got towards a launch, the more of a rush it felt. There was all the campaign and UTM activity and the admissions enquiry management, which I knew too little about in good enough time. Perhaps my checklist wasn’t all it should have been. But we dealt with it, and I could not have done much more in the time.

We launched the new Study super-site in mid-February. On the surface, it was grand. The menu looks well-considered. We’ve shed close to 1,000 pages. It looks far better than a few months’ work. But in the background, the chaos began.

The redirect protocols were all over the place, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it was a patchwork of different sites from different platforms. Secondly, there was a lot of post-migration movement to fit the new architecture. And thirdly, there was an invisible mass of old links and historic 301s that had kept things hanging by a thread in the old setup. One of our departments had created a nexus of 600 URLs in the past 18 months alone. The sheer volume of breakages created a lot of noise and stress. Already exhausted from the launch, I spent the weekend immediately after it remapping an old sitemap of 1,800 records to new destinations.

Then, there were fixes that were done in haste, like a site that had built its content almost entirely in tables, which looked horrific in the new accessibility-first standards. But that also unravelled in its own way and for its own reasons.

There have been complaints to my director. It’s taken the firefighting up to a level I’ve not personally had to fight before. And I have fought resolutely. I’m used to watching my back and collecting receipts. This has proved exactly why that is useful.

But it has taken a toll. I lost my patience with a stakeholder in a way I haven’t done before and had to apologise the following day. I anticipate a further complaint at some point because some teams are concerned about changes to their ways of working. My director half-jokingly asked if we needed a war-room.

I’m fast running out of lives. And at one point, I did question whether it was going to need my resignation.

It’s all very surreal. This should have been the pinnacle of my career so far, and it’s felt like the opposite. Perhaps, looking at the timings, this chain of events was somewhat inevitable. I can look at what I’ve done and think ‘who else gets that done to that calibre in that time?’

But that’s too often a false dichotomy. The institutions I’ve left didn’t crumble just because I left (although tellingly two of them did have to increase the grade and salary of the job I vacated). And other people do seem to get things done without the stress or the melodrama that I seem to experience.

Perhaps I’ve been so deep in the bubble, I’ve overestimated the seriousness of some of these issues. And yet, for something that caters to this size of audience, how can you not? Were I a new starter at the university, I would still be (just) in my probationary period – I’d be an easy evictee.

So yes, something that my mind said would be a dream has proven a bit of a nightmare, and I haven’t yet reconciled that with my blunted ego and professional pride. (At least I’m just about self-aware enough to know that I do have an abundance of both.)

Rarely, but occasionally, a problem might better be solved with one’s absence rather than one’s presence. Perhaps this is one such occasion. In years past, I might have skipped the nine-lives allegory in favour of Icarus, flying too close to the sun. Now, I’ll just spin on that idea by saying: maybe it’s time to plan a holiday.