Drupal CxO Barcelona
Last Thursday and Friday there was another Drupal CxO meeting. This time it was in Barcelona. The CxO event is for C-level executives of Drupal companies. It's all about business and doing what the Drupal community is good at: sharing knowledge and experience. It was good to see there were besides the usual suspects, new faces. This is just another sign the Drupal community is still growing.
The format of the meeting was as usual in "Open space" format. Everybody that has a subject to discuss can bring it up. The topics are quite divers. We talked about business models, maintenance contracts, marketing Drupal, agile ways of working etc.
The topics and discussions during the event show that Drupal is getting more mature. A few years ago during the first CxO event, the discussions were about project management tools, growing from a 5 person Drupal company to a 20 people company. Now the topics were more about new business models, global partnerships and serving the enterprise.
Business models and partnerships
How do Drupal companies make money? Is there a possibility to move from a pure "professional services" company that charges hours to a company that charges for value. To be able to do that you have to move up in the value chain. Shifting from building to also doing strategy. Delivering a complete package could be very beneficial.
Wunderkraut for example, makes a lot of money doing hosting. This gives them recurring fixed income every month. Not all Drupal companies want to do hosting because they are not system administrators. But maybe there is a way to do this by partnering with a Drupal hosting company. we spoke briefly about the possibility to streamline the support process when doing this with the guys from Aberdeencloud.
A partnership can be beneficial in more than one way.
- Get business from each other
- Focus on the things you like and do good
- Take on larger projects together
But remember that the grass is always greener on the other side. Consulting firms want to do IT and IT companies want to do consultancy. It might be easier to go from technical company to consulting firm, but it still will take a lot of time. The danger of not shifting one way or another could be that you will get crushed between the companies that extend to the other side.
Processes and management
There were a few sessions about managing processes and doing projects. We talked about how to do maintenance is a good way. What kind of contracts are used? With or without hosting, fixed price, based on hours etc. The most of the companies do somewhat the same:
- Sell a fixed amount of hours
- Have some kind of SLA, but do not promise too much.
- Standardize as much as possible
It would be nice if there is a possibility to switch from hours to added value in this case too, but that is not trivial and none of the companies had done that with great success.
Another hot topic still is doing projects the "Agile" way. All companies use some kind of agile way of working, like Kanban or Scrum. The general consensus was that this kind of methods work better in big projects. The smaller projects are just to short to do a real agile project.
An important point of discussion was the documentation during the project of changes and new user stories. Clients tend to "forget" they changed their mind. So it's very important that you administrate when a new story was added or a story was changed by the client. A interesting way of doing this is combining Redmine with the Backlog plugin with Xplanner. The last tool makes it very clear when a certain change was introduced in the project. There is an experimental connection available. As we already use Redmine and the Backlogs plugin this looks very interesting.
Drupal vs Out-of-the-box
This session was about how we can compete with commercial systems that do certain stuff out of the box very well. To mind comes A/B-testing and content marketing. More and more enterprise customers demand this kind of functionalities. To compete in that market having this functionality out of the box would make a huge difference. Off course, everything can be build with Drupal, but if there is a product that can do that without programming....
For example Sitecore can do A/B-testing out of the box. This would be a feature that could be very beneficial for Drupal if there is a good module available.
The plan is to start a group on Drupal.org to discuss the current problems and see if we can find a way to address those. So, to be continued.
Thanks!
I want to thank the organization and the sponsors that made this event possible. I'm looking forward to the next one. Hopefully again in a nice location like Barcelona.
For some more pictures see this set of Baris Wanschers.