Rail Safety Standards Board 

The Rail Safety and Standards Board, established in 2003, is a British independent company which supports the rail industry to deliver a better and most importantly, safer service. Through their rigorous research programme the RSSB collect, collate and analyse data in order to develop intelligent and applicable standards and regulations. They have a number of key stakeholders including various rail industry organisations, such as Network Rail, train operating companies, rolling stock companies and the Department for Transport. 

RSSB came to ClerksWell seeking help to develop a more synthesized and organised content strategy to provide the internal communications team with better content governance and stakeholders with an optimized user experience. ClerksWell were tasked with replicating and expanding the functionality of RSSB’s existing Standards & Research catalogues - which were previously based in SharePoint – within their Sitecore CMS instance.

The Challenge

Previous to their work with ClerksWell, the RSSB’s content was spread across too many different platforms. This made it very difficult for the internal communication team to maintain control and consistency of their content and presented the RSSB’s users with a confusing user experience due to the contrasting branding and search capabilities in comparison with the public website. The RSSB sought out ClerksWell to streamline their digital strategy by uniting their catalogues with all their other information located within their Sitecore website.

With 8.5K documents contained within the Standards Catalogue alone, the RSSB’s content management strategy required not only an overhaul to bring the internal content management under one roof, but also a carefully considered migration plan and sound technical implementation to ensure all of the documents were successfully re-created in the Sitecore CMS in an automated manner.

ClerksWell would also be required to work in parallel on the Sitecore tenancy with the RSSB’s in-house development team who were focusing on a variety of other projects and BAU. Meticulous planning & coordination would therefore be needed to ensure the entire digital programme remained on track, and no issues were introduced by conflicting code branches.

Solution

The project kicked off with an initial Discovery Phase to review, challenge and expand the requirements set out by the RSSB to ensure they were maximising their potential within the Sitecore CMS, and to agree on a technical approach with the RSSB Development Team which aligned with their digital roadmap. We also worked with them to establish a project schedule which would ensure that the project objectives and primary stakeholder expectations were met, whilst also ensuring that any key milestones across the digital programme were adhered to.

Once expectations had been set by both parties, ClerksWell worked with pre-produced wire frames and designs to map out the User Experience and visual appearance for the new page that would match RSSB’s existing branding.

Once the UX and designs had been agreed upon, ClerksWell commenced the Build stage of the project. They were able to develop a precise filtering and advanced search function, powered by SOLR, such that all primary type documents are now searchable by document number, keywords or browsable by various filters.

The Results

The replication of the catalogues on the web provided an innovative solution that ensures the RSSB’s digital strategy is future ready. The project equips the RSSB with a powerful platform that allows them to create and manage all of their content in one place, making their internal processes much more efficient. Moving from SharePoint to Sitecore gives the RSSB the opportunity to easily update the catalogues, expand their capabilities over time and provide an elite user experience for their key stakeholders and the general public.   

The Outcome

Have a look at the images below to see the outcome in full