Case study
University of Illinois Chicago: Automation & efficiency
UIC partnered with Human Made to address scalability and maintenance bottlenecks and ensure that their digital infrastructure could support the university’s growing needs.
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1. About the University of Illinois Chicago
With 34,000+ students, 12,000 employees, 16 colleges, and a major public medical centre, UIC is Chicago’s largest university. Ranked among the top 50 most innovative universities in the USA, UIC traces its origins back to 1859.
With deep roots in health sciences, UIC’s strengths include engineering and technology, urban planning and public administration, the social sciences, and business. The university is proud to be among the top 10 universities for social mobility.
2. Managing complexity at scale
UIC faced significant operational challenges with their platform, which manages over 600 production sites on a Pantheon multisite network.
Each network had its own separately-managed codebase, leading to a complex manual build and deploy process. This process was further complicated by codebase being split across two GitHub repositories: changes to a Pattern Lab design system had to be merged into the WordPress site codebase itself before deployment to Pantheon.
This setup hindered collaboration across the UIC community, making it difficult for external contributors to provide code updates without introducing errors.
The platform faced scalability, infrastructure maintenance, and development bottlenecks. UIC’s DevOps team spent more time managing infrastructure than focusing on innovation.
UIC engaged Human Made to consolidate these repositories, modernise their continuous integration (CI) process, and centralise code management, simplifying both development and deployment.
3. Centralisation, automation, and best practices
With the goal of centralising UIC’s codebase and automating their deployment pipeline in mind, we got to work. Working with our partners within UIC’s technical teams, we developed an architectural plan to support a continuous deployment workflow, centralising changes within one central repository that deploys to all environments. This centralisation will empower new contributors from across the university community to submit patches through a centralised workflow, while ensuring code quality and stability by making use of established industry CI best practices.
We began by proposing a unified repository strategy to streamline operations. The key milestones included merging the Pattern Lab and WordPress repositories without losing any Git history, and introducing Composer to manage third-party plugins and dependencies. This eliminated the need to manually merge code across two separate repositories and enabled consistent and reliable code updates across all sites.
Next, we integrated GitHub Actions into UIC’s workflow to automate the previously manual build and deployment process. This CI pipeline ensured that changes could be tested and deployed automatically, significantly reducing human error. Additionally, we configured Dependabot to handle plugin updates automatically, further relieving the team from routine maintenance tasks.
Throughout the project Human Made collaborated closely with UIC, offering recommendations and iterating based on their needs. The goal was to ensure UIC’s team had a modern, efficient workflow while maintaining the flexibility needed to manage such a large, multisite network.
It’s always rewarding to implement new features for a site, but it can be even more powerful to make it easier for every new feature to deploy quickly and correctly. Ruthwik and Michael were incredibly responsive and skilled collaborators, and we’re very excited to see how this centralized deploy platform will save their team time and enable contributions from across the University community going forward.
K Adam white, Principal Engineer, Human Made
4. Reduced complexity, improved collaboration
By consolidating the two codebases and centralising the repository, UIC now benefits from a unified codebase that can be managed and deployed across multiple Pantheon sites.
The introduction of Composer and GitHub Actions has automated much of the development workflow, enabling faster, more reliable deployments.
The new CI pipeline ensures that changes can be rolled out efficiently across all environments, with support for multi-site deployment to individual Pantheon instances as needed.
Additionally, UIC’s team is now able to incorporate broader contributions from across the university, thanks to added security and code style tooling, which helps ensure quality and security in any new code contributions.
We wanted developers to work more independently and work on improving and providing new features instead of maintaining the infrastructure… we had a great time working with Human Made and have now made our process very automated.”
Ruthwik Reddy, DevOps Engineer, UIC
5. A partnership built to last
We believe that every project is improved when people are at the heart of it, and our work with UIC is no exception. The strong partnership between UIC and Human Made resulted in a modern, centralised, and automated DevOps process that reduced complexity and enabled scalable, efficient management of UIC’s digital properties.
Our ongoing positive collaboration led to the identification of best practices that could be implemented across UIC’s DevOps processes, including advanced CI/CD workflows, automation of multidev environments, and security-focused development pipelines.
Despite some challenges with the complexity of merging codebases and managing incremental updates from the live site, the partnership with UIC has delivered significant long-term benefits.
UIC’s team now has a streamlined, automated process in place, and the Human Made team is looking forward to continuing to support them in further improving and scaling their digital infrastructure.
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