Higher ed IT and marketing teams often evaluate Drupal migration partner the same way they'd vet any software vendor, focusing on technical specs and implementation timeline.
That's a mistake. Drupal migrations in higher ed surface specific risks that generic evaluations miss: governance complexity across multiple stakeholder groups (faculty, departments, admissions, advancement), accreditation and accessibility compliance requirements built into the platform, and long-term capability needs that extend beyond typical IT staff turnover cycles.
These 10 questions are drawn from real migration scenarios. They're designed to separate partners with institutional experience from those executing from a playbook.
Strategy & Environment
1. Walk me through how you assess our legacy CMS. What specifically do you look for?
Experienced partners describe how they evaluate content governance debt across multiple departments and stakeholder groups, identify technical and organizational barriers, and separate what must be fixed from what can be carried forward. Vague mentions of a kickoff audit are a red flag.
Red flag bonus for higher ed: Partners who don't ask about faculty workflows, content approval chains, or departmental autonomy haven't worked in higher ed environments.
2. What's the typical budget range for a migration like ours, and what drives variance?
Transparent partners give ranges based on scope factors they've already identified, including multi-year implementation cycles, the number of departments and content owners involved, accreditation compliance work, accessibility remediation, and training for distributed faculty groups, and are upfront about where contingency is needed. Evasive partners say "it depends" without explaining why.
Higher ed reality: Budget often depends on whether your institution's capital planning process allows phased spending or requires a single allocation.
Risk & Execution
3. Walk me through a specific critical issue you hit during migration. How did you handle it?
This reveals incident management discipline. Partners who can describe a real example of how they communicated, who decided on the fix, and what it cost have institutionalized processes. Generic answers mean they haven't learned from failures, or don't document them.
Higher ed consideration: Ask specifically about issues that arose with faculty content, publishing workflows, or user access during a migration. These are the most common pain points in academic environments.
4. How do you build capability transfer so our team can maintain Drupal long-term?
This is your vendor lock-in test. Strong partners invest in your team's independence through training, documentation, and gradual knowledge transfer. Partners who avoid the question are designing for dependency, not partnership.
5. What's your governance framework during and after migration?
Governance determines whether your Drupal system stays maintainable in a decentralized higher ed environment. Strong answers cover departmental content ownership and approval chains, faculty publishing workflows, role-based access control, metadata standards that support searchability and accreditation reporting, accessibility compliance checks built into publishing processes, and documentation standards that describe how these are enforced after go-live, not just during the project.
This matters in higher ed: Your partner should have a template or framework for multi-department governance, not ask you to invent it from scratch.
6. Can you share 3–5 comparable migrations? What went well and what was harder than expected?
Vague answers or refusals to name projects are warning signs. You want recent, comparable examples, specifically other higher ed institutions of similar size, with similar numbers of departments and content owners, plus references who will answer honestly about both sides of the experience.
Ask references specifically: How did the partner handle faculty adoption? Were there surprises around departmental workflows or approval processes?
Partnership & Long-Term
7. What does success look like at month 6 and month 12, not just at go-live?
Partners committed to outcomes define success beyond launch: stabilization periods, performance baselines, content completeness across departments, and measurable goals tied to your business objectives. Partners who define success as go-live are transactional.
Higher ed context: Success should account for the academic calendar, not measure adoption in summer when faculty are scattered; plan for the fall semester as your real adoption window.
8. How do you handle scope and budget changes mid-project?
Look for documented change request processes, adjusted timelines, and transparent budget reconciliation. Partners who make ad hoc changes without documentation will quietly erode your budget and timeline.
9. Who will actually be on our project team? Are they permanent or rotating?
Named individuals with consistent presence build accountability and context. Rotating junior staff is a cost-cutting move that hurts project continuity.
In higher ed, this is critical: Ask for bios of the people you'll actually work with, not just the account lead on the pitch. Specifically ask: Does the team include someone with higher ed experience? How long have core team members worked together? Will the same Drupal architect/lead be present from discovery through post-launch training?
10. How does your migration approach position us for AI readiness?
This question separates partners who've thought strategically about your institution's AI future from those who treat migration as a one-time technical project. Strong answers describe: content architecture that enables AI applications (structured data, metadata standards, API layers) without sacrificing governance; how they'd structure access controls to prevent unauthorized AI model training on sensitive or proprietary institutional content; and what documentation and processes they'd hand off so your team can safely experiment with AI tools post-launch. Good partners also acknowledge the governance complexity: AI systems can hallucinate, misattribute sources, or expose student data if not carefully managed.
Higher ed consideration: Ask specifically about student privacy and data protection. How does their approach ensure student information stays protected if an AI system accesses your Drupal content? Partners with a framework for privacy-aware, governance-first AI integration understand higher ed realities. Partners who say "we'll figure that out later" haven't done the work.
How to Use These Questions
Partners who answer with specificity and acknowledge trade-offs have built systems that work. Partners who deflect, generalize, or focus only on their own expertise have not.
Vardot's Approach
We treat migrations as strategic engagements, not implementations, especially in higher ed, where governance is inherently distributed, faculty adoption determines success, and AI readiness shapes your institution's competitive position. That means dedicated team continuity, the same people from discovery through go-live and faculty training; a defined governance framework that accounts for departmental autonomy, multi-stakeholder workflows, and privacy-aware AI integration, built before content moves; and a structured post-launch support model with measurable success criteria at 6 and 12 months that specifically tracks faculty adoption, departmental content completeness, and your readiness to experiment with AI applications.
These questions reflect exactly what we'd expect a rigorous higher ed buyer to ask us.
Use them as a minimum evaluation to evaluate Drupal migration partner.
