Lullabot

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of technology and development at NBC Universal for Bravo, Oxygen, and Universal Kids. I oversee the technical development of our digital properties including Drupal developers and video operations for each of those three brands.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Lullabot?

The backend of our websites is currently hosted in Drupal 7. We wanted to move to Drupal 8.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The scope of the project was fairly large. The volume of work was the equivalent of three standalone projects. Lullabot replatformed our Bravo and Oxygen sites to Drupal 8. Both have numerous offshoot components that serve both the web and also Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles, and Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

Lullabot also upgraded most of the code. They finished several incomplete modules for the Drupal 8 community. We plan to have them replatform a third site for Universal Kids in the near future.  

What is the team composition?

between 8–10 people from Lullabot were assigned to our project. We worked directly with the developers as well as a project manager.

How did you come to work with Lullabot?

We initially found them through word of mouth. At this point, we've had a long history working with Lullabot. They’ve supported a variety of projects for us over the past five years including a migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. Having had a good experience working together on that project, they were the obvious choice for our next one.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from May 2018–February 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Since we just launched the new websites, we don’t have definitive results to share yet. Given the complexity of the platforms, we anticipated problems after the launch, but none have occurred. Lullabot hasn't had to make any fixes after the launch. but we haven’t. Everything’s working, which is great. It was a similar experience with the previous project. The scope of work for this project certainly would have been challenging for other teams. They managed it all well.

How did Lullabot perform from a project management standpoint?

We generally used Slack for both technical and nontechnical communication. We held regular stand-up meetings with them plus a weekly check in with the project management team.

We used Jira to track tickets and the project overall. Other collaboration tools we used were Google Hangouts and Zoom.

The team's communications style is great. They use a sophisticated system to determine the project’s velocity including deadlines. I found that impressive, and haven't seen it with other teams.

They could easily shift gears, escalate priorities, or switch out teammates whenever we needed. Midway through the project, they brought in a more senior project manager to ensure they met deadlines.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Lullabot clearly explained technical requirements in layman's terms. The developers' great communication skills were especially helpful. They listened carefully to our requirements, conducted discovery of their own, and returned with options within a short timeframe, often by the next day.  No other development house I've used has had this skill.  

Since we’re not heavily staffed, Lullabot's support has been great for our organization. They save us the time we usually have to spend writing out detailed requirements. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

There's nothing I can think of.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

It's important to know what you want out of your engagement with Lullabot from the start. Compare their previous work with what you want to do. It's also helpful to see if any existing code can be reused.

BACKGROUND

Could you briefly describe your organization?

TheaterMania is a company that is involved in the performing arts industry. We have a content driven website that provides news, reviews, and editorial articles about all goings-on in theater and live entertainment. We also offer discount ticket sales as well as run a members-only club for exclusive ticket access, and we also operate a SaaS [software as a service]-based ticketing platform that is mostly used by nonprofit theaters.

What is your position?

I’m the chief technology officer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenges that you were attempting to address when you first approached Lullabot?

I mentioned that we run a members-only area wherein we provide exclusive access to certain tickets to members of that club. That system was built on a very old software platform, which probably goes back 10 or 11 years. It was built on ColdFusion, and it was not sustainable in terms of making product improvements, and was not maintainable in terms of getting the right resources to understand the code. We made a decision to completely rewrite and relaunch the platform using Drupal. I was familiar with Lullabot, having worked with them in the past at Martha Stewart Living, so they were one of the first calls that I made. The goal behind the upgrade was to modernize the entire code base, rather than deciding between an open source versus proprietary solution. We wanted the most effective solution that would be able to scale with us as we grew and diversified our content options.

SOLUTION

Could you describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail?

Their primary responsibilities were all related to custom software development as well as some architectural planning. We did not use them for project management, product management, or for features planning, and things like that. They were more involved in figuring out the technical strategy and also doing a large part of the implementation. We shared the implementation in-house, and we also had one other consulting company work on the project.

How did you select Lullabot as your partner for this project?

I had worked with Lullabot before, so I knew their reputation and the quality of their work from previous engagements. That’s really what led to my choice.

Could you provide a general cost estimate for this particular engagement?

[it was approximately] $350,000.

When was the project completed?

The site was launched November 3, 2014.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the quality of their performance?

We don’t have much because the site is still so new. It’s barely two months old. The initial feedback has all been positive. My comments are all positive in terms of project management. They were extremely responsive and extremely engaged throughout the project. They worked the hours and times that were required of them to complete their work and move the project along. They did not miss any of our deadlines; they were always on time, and the work was of high quality. They worked very well with our own team members, and we found them to be great instructors, too. Their knowledge of Drupal is bar none.

In retrospect, are there areas in which you think they could improve as a service provider?

Based on our experience, no. They performed extremely well, consistently meeting our demanding requirements.

BACKGROUND

Could you briefly describe your organization?

I work for a large multimedia conglomerate. I’m working within the news division, and a collection of news related brands reside in this division.

What is your position?

My title is vice president of technology strategy. In practice, I’m operationally responsible for all of our digital programs.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenge that you were attempting to address when you first approached Lullabot?

We approached Lullabot because we acquired an old website that we needed to restructure and rebrand. That acquisition was done in order to align the cable property with the digital brand. Previously, since there was a digital joint venture that was not aligned with the cable channel, we had the television channel that was not aligned with the corresponding website. We purchased their share in the website and rebranded it, to identify it properly as the general news portal that it was. That freed up our brand to be re-applied to a brand new website that would be the digital home for our cable channel.

I was tasked with architecting and building out the new website, and we knew that we would need a strong development partner, and that’s why we sought out Lullabot. The rationale behind selecting an open source platform was that there was a strong Drupal program within our company. There is a central technology organization that creates a distribution of Drupal, focused on the entertainment and media brands within our company. There’s a core development team that produces this Drupal distribution on behalf of all the brands. It has custom modules and some things that would be common to all of our brands. They also provide a relationship with Acquia for their managed hosting services.

SOLUTION

Could you describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail?

We’ve been working with them since January of 2013. The original project was the launch of the rebranded site. We only had one or two internal developers, so we weren’t able to do development internally. We had a design firm that provided the user experience and user interface design. Lullabot performed the bulk of the software development, although some work was done internally and through other contractors. Lullabot acted as the primary contractor for the launch of the site.

How did you select Lullabot as your partner?

Members of our team referred them to us internally.

Could you provide a general cost estimate for this particular engagement?

It was in the $1.2 million range.

When was the site launched?

The site launched in 2013. We’ve continued to use Lullabot post-launch to improve our systems.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the quality of their performance?

I don’t have any metrics or figures that make sense because we had no site prior to their work. We did collect some user feedback through Twitter, but I don’t have the exact numbers. We saw very positive reactions from users on social media, and our management team was very satisfied. The site has been improved several times since its launch, most of which have been done with Lullabot.

When working with Lullabot, is there anything that you would consider unique or special about their approach that distinguishes them from other vendors?

One of the things that we really benefited from was having them instruct some of our newer developers. During the project, we went out and began hiring full-time resources to help maintain the site in the long-term, after the launch. As we began to board new members, Lullabot worked hand-in-hand with them to get them up to speed with the build. During post-launch, they stayed on for several months as we continued adding support staff. We didn’t just get a development project done, we got a whole new development methodology out of it as well. Whether it’s the way the team does peer review, run scrums, the way they assess and prioritize tasks within our ticketing system and assign point values to help you budget your sprints, [using] communication methodology rather than Internet messaging.

We also got great custom software that allows our developers to build pull request environments within the Drupal ecosystem. They helped us build a whole development process in terms of getting code from local to a development server, to a QA [quality assurance] server, to a preproduction server, and then up into production. They also helped us build a server that allows any developer to create a brand new test environment based on a GitHub pull request of some code they’re working on. So, they can actually spin up, in real time, a test environment that verifies their latest code changes, and then shares the results with the rest of the development team. This allows them to do quality assurance independent of any other code changes, and then integrate it back into the main branch.

All of those things were developed under their guidance, so that’s really what separated them from  being some regular development shop that ships some code over the fence. They really worked with us as a business, with our development team, to develop a process, methodology, and efficient manner of working. That’s what we’ve gotten out of them in addition to fantastic code.

In retrospect, are there areas in which you think they could improve as a service provider?

Only in the sense that we probably want more dedicated resources. They’re a relatively small shop, by comparison. But, they grow methodically. They want to make sure they pull in the right folks, which is why, everyone you get from them, is vetted for quality. They carefully consider every single person they bring on to a project. They have great developers who are smart, intuitive, and have incredible foresight. They don’t just work on a problem, they anticipate problems down the road. They make sure the solution they’re delivering anticipates your growth and your needs. One might be paying slightly more for these guys, but they’re getting what might be two or three people from some lesser development shop.

BACKGROUND

Could you please describe your organization?

I work for a century-old trade association that represents the independent brick-and-mortar bookstore community here in the U.S. We have about 1,700 members representing 2,000 individual bookstores across the country, as some companies have more than one outlet. Independent is the key word in our mission. We don’t represent chains like Barnes and Noble. Books-A-Million is not a member of ours, either. Most of the activities that we offer are consistent with other trade association activities. There’s advocacy, we’re a 501(c)(6) corporation not a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, allowing us to do public policy work with government.

We also host educational seminars around the country at different times of the year for members. We try to create partnerships with vendors that are advantageous to our members, pretty standard stuff for a trade association. In addition to that; however, we have a small oddly shaped tech company called Books and Ink. It provides an e-commerce platform that is used by around 400 of our own members. These members are able to fashion the front-end design for their customers, and we handle the entire back-end. That e-commerce platform is Drupal-based.

What is your position?

I’m the director of technology.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenges that you were trying to address when you approached Lullabot with this project?

The e-commerce offerings are more than a decade old. It started with a proprietary product back in 2000, and that was a difficult situation. We thought we would strike out and roll our own. We did that using Drupal 5 to begin with, and we had about 200 users at that time and upgraded ourselves to Drupal 6. Over the course of the next couple of years, we doubled the number of users from 200 to 400 on the Drupal 6 platform. It was a little over a year ago that we took note of the fact that the Drupal community was planning to retire support for Drupal 6, and we would need to upgrade to Drupal 7 in order to stay current.

We realized a couple of things at that point. First of all, the differences between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 were very significant. While we had in-house expertise, it would be a challenging undertaking for us to do on the technical side. Secondly, we had no reason to be confident that we were the sharpest crayons in the box, and really wanted the opportunity of an upgrade correctly. In order to guarantee a smooth transition, we decided to engage experts from outside our little universe. That’s when we began looking for a qualified partner. We wanted to see if there were innovations or considerations that we wouldn’t have come up with on our own. We wanted to be able to improve our processes, too, with this project. We were really looking for someone that could offer recommendations about how we might re-architect our backend, to improve how we run things on the inside. A lot of us wanted to maximize the value we got out of the new platform, so it was also important to have experts that could offer instruction on best practices and so forth.

SOLUTION

Describe the scope of their involvement. For instance, what were the primary responsibilities and objectives during this engagement?

We wanted an architectural critique first and foremost. We also wanted help with writing complex, custom code. We have not yet taken advantage of the architectural critique. It’s a multiyear project, and the sequencing has put the architecture later in the process. Where we engaged Lullabot most heavily was to help rebuild the site using Drupal 7, wholly separate from the Drupal 6 platform, and also to write the migration code for sites that are going from 6 to 7.

So, they were more deeply involved in all of the fundamental code work of the platform, and we’ve taken responsibility for the individual site migrations. Over the course of time, we have beaten the hell out of everything with myriad custom code that it would have taken us several more years to educate someone as to how we got it there. We figured we’d leave everything on the back-end behind and simply migrate all of our contents over to the new system, which they basically built. We’ve been preparing things on our end and then performing the migrations by ourselves. 

How did you first identify Lullabot as a potential partner and then select them among alternative candidates?

We went through a thorough selection process, and we sent out RFPs [request for proposals] to a number of companies. Because we had already been working in the Drupal ecosystem, so we had some knowledge of the development community. We felt good about our contacts. Through that selection process, Lullabot became our choice for a couple of reasons.

Their technical reputation was unquestionable, so we knew that they could handle the job on the engineering side. They also had a solid understanding of business and technology strategy. They’re really considered thought leaders in the Drupal space, along with a few others. Other candidates were disqualified because of project size, time frame and, at the end of the day because we felt more confident in the approach set forth by Lullabot.

Could you provide a general cost estimate for the size of this engagement?

[It was about] $250,000.

When was this engagement concluded?

We have an ongoing relationship with them. We rehired their senior architect on a different project altogether, unrelated to the platform upgrade. We currently have that architect working for us on a new project that’s expected to finish at the end of January. That speaks to the relationship we established with them. To be clear, we even re-initiated a selection process for this newer project. Of course, Lullabot was invited to submit another proposal along with a revised group of vendors.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback you’ve received that would demonstrate the quality of their work?

Our in-house team is deeply grateful to Lullabot, and we experience the benefit of their work every day that we continue this upgrade project. We haven’t had any issues with any of the site transitions. Those things are invisible to the end users because they work so flawlessly. All of the sudden, things are a little easier, streamlined. There’s a new function that wasn’t there before, and little issues that existed in our older system aren’t present anymore. Lullabot is an extremely competent group, and through our work with them they’ve taught us a lot of tactics related to project management. It was great to see them work together, and how they were able to maintain momentum and quality. We’ve adopted some of their same tactics and practices here in-house to up our game. It’s been an extremely rewarding partnership.

Reflecting on your experience with Lullabot, is there anything specific that stands out when compared to other vendors in areas of service and expertise?

Early in our relationship, their operations manager and some of their development crew came to see us onsite. I thought that was a nice gesture. They made an effort to come and see a client when it wasn’t necessary. With them it’s not just work, it can be something deeper than that. Greg Dunlap was the senior architect we collaborated with, he was here for several days on a few different occasions. A couple of those times he was accompanied by the development team working on our project, too. I appreciated his knowledge and skills, to see how a group is discussing a problem, and he’s able to be insightful and respectful to the relationships he perceives. He’s got a neat way of bringing difficult situations up in a context that allows the group to work on them, rather than experience the agitation that can be common to this type of situation.

There was a Drupal security vulnerability that was detected a couple of months ago, and we did not have an active relationship with Lullabot at the time. However, within minutes of this vulnerability being detected, Dunlap contacted us with information on how to fix it. That had everything do to with them being thoughtful and considerate. It wasn’t even their responsibility, but they felt compelled to get us the relevant news as quickly as possible, understanding the risk to our business operations. Who knows how long it might have taken to implement the fix had they not approached us independently. That’s much more of a partnership than most vendor relations.

In retrospect, are there areas in which they could improve as a service provider?

Nothing comes to mind. We continue to be impressed by how they connect with us and how they accomplish their work. We’re always looking for ways to streamline our processes, hone our internal practices, and improve the functionalities on our sites. They help us meet those ends.

BACKGROUND

Could you briefly describe your organization?

I work for a TV network within a larger media company comprised mostly of reality television shows, albeit we do have some scripted shows as well. I work in the digital media group. We’re in the process of merging with another network as well, which is also largely a reality television network similar to us.

What is your position?

I’m the vice president of technology.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenge that you were attempting to address when you first approached Lullabot?

We were looking to migrate from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. We were also looking to do a full redesign of our website, moving from multiple templates of desktop and mobile, with no specific tablet experience, to a responsive site. Through that, we were looking to accomplish a handful of goals. We were trying to retain more users, expose more content, blow out our blog system, and have an overall more updated and dynamic website.

SOLUTION

Could you describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail?

They were responsible for custom development on the functional side. We did the actual design, and Lullabot was responsible for the back-end and front-end building of the site. They did all the coding and the migration. They also built a continuous integration environment for us, and then taught us how to use it.

This was the first real enterprise level project we had done using GitHub, so they taught us about how to use the repository, and they did offer some design expertise, and how to work with responsive. They had someone come onsite for a week and work with our design team, which was pretty great.

How did you select Lullabot as your partner for this project?

We had worked with them one time before I joined the organization. They had done our single sign-on user system for us, and the project went really well. I had hired them two years ago to do a full analysis of doing a migration from D6 to D7, sort of a way to test the waters with them. We thought that was very successful also. I think that they have some of the best contributors to Drupal, so it was sort of an easy choice.

Could you provide a general cost estimate for this ongoing engagement?

[It was] $1 million.

What’s the duration of your engagement?

The first version of our site launched on December 8 of this year [2014]. Starting January 1, [2015,] we’re going to begin Version 2, which will be about a four- to five-month engagement with Lullabot, to fill in the gaps of all the features that didn’t make it into the first version. We went through a round of user testing after launch, and got some feedback that we want to incorporate into the design. After that period, the Lullabot team will likely roll off.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the quality of their performance?

From a technical standpoint, the site is performing quite well. The response time is half of what it was on our D6 site. Pages are loading almost twice as fast for our users than they were on D6, which I think is great. From an analytics standpoint, the usage has been satisfactory. We were expecting a big dip initially, but we haven’t seen that yet. At the same time, it hasn’t exploded either.

Our unique visitors are up, but it’s difficult to tell where and how that could happen. Our page views are slightly down, but that was also expected. The best thing for us is our short-form video views are up. Overall, everyone is quite happy with the analytics because we thought there would be a drop, and things have remained pretty steady. We didn’t see any dip in usage after the relaunch.

When working with Lullabot, is there anything that you’d consider special about their approach or development process that distinguishes them from other vendors?

I think the thing we were most happy with, which is the thing we often have the most pain with, was both expectations and project management. The project manager that worked with us was exceptional. He was very technical, so he didn’t have to spend much time going back and forth with the developers. He was able to answer questions directly, and made best use of our time to review our priorities and make sure that things were getting assigned to developers. He actually switched project management styles twice during the project, for efficiency’s sake and to meet our requirements, which was nice.

They delivered on time. I don’t think there were any core missing features. I think our expectations were pretty high; we were pretty demanding, and we had some specific dates that we needed to hit in order to be finished by the end of the year. We were able to meet those deadlines, which was fantastic. This was probably the best vendor relationship we’ve had on a project, especially of this scale.