How NFPA Is Bringing Paper Processes Online With Drupal 8

©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Firewise 2.0
Bringing a paper process
online with Drupal 8
Nov 9, 2017

Speakers
Aron Anderson
Associate Project Manager,
Wildfire Division
NFPA
Nick Switzer
Development Director
Elevated Third

What is Firewise?

Empowering neighbors to work
together to reduce the wildfire risk in
their communities since 2002.
What is Firewise?

5
What is Firewise?
The Firewise USA
program teaches
people how to
adapt to living
with wildfire to
help save lives and
property.

What is Firewise?
Using a five-step process, communities develop an
action plan guiding their residential risk reduction
activities that helps residents build a safer place to live.
● The five-steps (communities must renew annually):
○ Obtain a wildfire risk assessment.
○ Form a board or committee, and create an action plan.
○ Conduct a “Firewise Day” event.
○ Invest a minimum of $2 per capita in local Firewise actions.
○ Submit an application to your state Firewise Liaison.

What is Firewise?
The Firewise USA Program Approval Process
● Work is done at the local level
● New applications are submitted to the state for review and approval
● State approved applications are forward to NFPA for final approval
and onboarding

Moving the Process Online
with Drupal 8

Firewise Online
The original
Firewise Program
application was a
PDF document, all
data filled in and
entered into a
database by hand

Firewise Online
The new Firewise
Program app has
been moved
online, built in
Drupal 8

We were open to any technology and
proposals. Our priorities were cost
effectiveness, product flexibility, and
the developer’s ability to be UX
focused and keep our target
audiences in mind.
Deciding on Drupal

12
Deciding on Drupal
Firewise had a few
hurdles for this project:
● No in-house developers or IT
Drupal support
● We were moving away from
existing contracts
● Convincing Leadership
(NFPA had never used
Drupal)

Deciding on Drupal
Going from an idea to an RFP
● Re-evaluated the program and created a Firewise life cycle.
● Research and outreach with key stakeholders.
● Developed a Functional Requirements Document (FRD) which lead to
the RFP.
● Long process: Nearly two years from starting Firewise 2.0 to selecting
a developer.

Deciding on Drupal
Drupal 8 is a perfect fit for Firewise
● Multiple, complex user roles with custom permissions (D8 Core).
● Siloed access based on role in a state and/or community (Groups).
● Multi-step application process with nested data (Form API and
Paragraphs).
● Reliable uptime, even during deployments (CMI).

Why is Drupal a good fit for Nonprofits?
● Out of the box responsiveness- Everything is Drupal 8 supports
responsive design
● Flexibility- modules, integrations, customizations
● Security- large security team, constant monitoring
● Multilingual Capabilities- Quickly translate sites into any language.
Drupal 8 is multilingual throughout.
Drupal 8 for Nonprofits

Designing Firewise 2.0

Discovery Phase
Elevated Third’s in-depth discovery phase begins with
a two-day discovery meeting that includes the entire
Elevated Third project team and all client stakeholders.
● In this meeting, we cover everything from low-level requirements
and task priority, to big ideas such as how to improve the Firewise
application process from a UX and development standpoint

18
Initial UX
The Elevated Third team
combined all of the
notes from discovery
and spent an afternoon
creating an affinity
diagram to help reveal
patterns in the
application process.

19
Personas
You can't write user
stories if you don't
know who your users
are.
During discovery, we
identified three main
user personas that
represented five
different Drupal roles.
Pat, The State
Liaison
Jim, The Property
Manager
Dave, The
Organizer

Site Architecture and Estimation
● Content types, entities,
users and roles started to
take shape based on wires
and flows.
● Implementation estimate,
based on user stories, wires
and flows.

This final Discovery deliverable
defines the project vision.
It combines all deliverables in one
place and includes a full feature list
and build estimate.
The Blueprint

Implementation

An Agile Mentality
Continuing a collaborative process
● The team chose to continue the collaborative process from discovery
that aided them well in understanding the project scope and
uncovering strong solutions.
● Dev and design worked together in sprints to quickly produce
working features.

Sprint Planning
Initial sprint planning
involved the whole
team, product owner
included, to determine
the plan and priorities
for the duration of
implementation.

Sprint Structure
An incremental development process
● The project was broken out into Two week sprints.
● Included three, 15-minute standups each week, one of which was a
progress review.
● Progress and new features were demoed live with the product owner
at the end of each sprint.

Implementation Must-Haves
The things that are essential to a successful
implementation process are:
● Focused, organized meetings
● Clear, honest communication
● The right ratio of tools and docs to shared understanding.
● An eye for the details without losing site of the big picture.

Drupal 8 Workflow

28
Drupal 8 Workflow
● Simplified thanks to tools
available to Drupal 8.
● Configuration managed
through CMI, along with the
Config Read-Only module.
● Composer used to manage
dependencies and packages.
Screenshot

QA & Functional Testing

QA & Functional Testing
● All testers need to work
from the same test plan.
● Bugs should be reported
and managed the same
way across all teams.
● Releasing fixes on
schedule in a dedicated
testing environment is key
to reducing confusion.

Launch.

Phased Rollout
This may not work for every scenario, but we had the
luxury of this being a brand new site. Our rollout
included:
● A closed, beta style launch.
● Lots of testing and review in the production environment before the
new system was rolled out to the general public.
● Some features needed to be in production to be fully tested (SSO).

Training & Documentation

Admin Training
Product owner and
Firewise team learned
the system gradually
through sprint reviews,
with one larger training
after the end of the final
development sprint.

PDF Manuals
PDF training documents
targeted at specific user
roles were produced
and distributed.
Documents were
created with both new
and current users in
mind.

Video Tutorials
To make the app as
easy to use as possible,
we developed
screencasts providing
detailed walkthroughs
of key user flows and
made these videos
publicly available.

37
Firewise
We helped
Firewise
transform a
cumbersome
paper process
into a powerful
digital workflow
that was
designed to
simplify
processes for
internal admins
and customers
alike.

Lessons Learned

Track Everything
All projects float on a sea of
uncertainty.
Try to limit that uncertainty by
identifying all assumptions as early
as you can.

Plan for Contingencies
Things will come up that you just
didn't plan for.
Have a plan for unexpected
contingencies.

Track Everything
Manage team expectations by
tracking everything.
Meticulous documentation helps
keep your team on the same page
and avoid things like scope creep.

Straight Talk
Clear communication and honesty
will always benefit the project.
Even when the news hurts a little,
don't pull punches. Dig in and find a
solution as a team.

Environment Parity
Push to make your dev, stage and
production environments as similar
as possible. Software stack is
important, but don't forget things
like users, SSL certificates, migration
data and files.

Staying on Budget is a Team Effort
Project budget and burn rate should
be communicated frequently to
everyone involved with the project
This awareness of time allocation
helps narrow the possible solutions.

Thank You!

How NFPA Is Bringing Paper Processes Online With Drupal 8

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