Drupal Connect

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the VP, designer, and developer at Blair Marketing.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Drupal Connect?

We engaged Drupal Connect to provide additional development work within various Drupal platforms.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Drupal Connect employs a variety of programming knowledge to further develop our platforms, including PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL.

For one project, they developed a product catalog landing page with several images. They incorporated a feature that allows users to scroll over each image to view variations of the products.

What is the team composition?

We work with one developer and a project manager.

How did you come to work with Drupal Connect?

We discovered them through email advertising and decided to reach out to their team. Our previous developer lost a lot of knowledge around our database as they switched their staff around. Luckily, Drupal Connect has been able to provide us with consistent resources who have become more of an extension of our team.

How much have you invested with them?

We've invested around $20,000 thus far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We've been working with them since March 2017.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Drupal Connect provides high-quality, focused, and consistent development work. They're good about prioritizing our needs and working quickly, without getting too sidetracked by other opportunities.

How did Drupal Connect perform from a project management standpoint?

We're very pleased with their project management overall. We typically don't impose deadlines because they continue to respond in a fairly timely manner. They utilize the Teamwork app to track their work, which we've also found to be helpful.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They've been able to provide solutions without us even needing to ask for them, improving the effectiveness of some of the products we've delivered to our clients. Not only do they fully grasp the requirements we provide them, but they're also able to add value in a way that doesn't disrupt the project.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Due to their varying locations across North America, we often experience connectivity issues when we try to connect to some of their remote staff. I'd suggest they invest in better communications technologies, so we don't have to repeat ourselves as often.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the founder of an events management app for web and mobile. Our platform provides non-profits and commercial brands with the tools to produce more impactful and effective events.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Drupal Connect?

We had signed up some major customers, but unfortunately, our lead developer at the time let us down.

What were your goals for this project?

I wanted to get my team and technology back on track.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I've heard about John (CEO, Drupal Connect) and his company through friends.

Can you go into detail about the services they provided and the scope of the project?

Drupal Connect is providing frontend development for web and mobile. We’re using Ionic, AngularJS, React Native, and JavaScript.

What was the team composition?

We’re working with two frontend developers and a project manager to oversee them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

So far, everything is good. John and his team understood the challenge and had a team on our project in just 48 hours. They were off to a fast and great start, so eveyrthing is now back on track. It was a total save.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

They included project management in the project price, which has made a huge difference. I communicate directly with the project manager, and she manages the dev team.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They delivered what they promised and quickly, which is quite rare.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of Facet Interactive. We’re a digital strategy and process consulting firm and we also work in the Enterprise Drupal space.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Drupal Connect?

We needed to migrate a client’s website from a Drupal Ubercart platform to a Drupal Commerce platform.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

In addition to the e-commerce platform migration, the team built out additional features and provided infrastructure support. They also created a reporting system to support the third-party’s affiliate program. Following all of the technical work, Drupal Connect provided performance tuning, fixed bugs, and made improvements and design changes as needed for two years.

What is the team composition?

We worked with the director of digital solutions, who acted as our project manager. We also interacted with an e-commerce developer and a senior developer.

How did you come to work with Drupal Connect?

As a digital agency, we have a network of partners that we generally look to when we need to staff a project. Using our client’s requirements, we created a request for proposal (RFP) and presented it to five of our partners. We relayed those bids to our end-client, along with portfolio examples, and explained our past experience with each partner. Our clients narrowed it down to two agencies, then ultimately chose Drupal Connect because they were located in the United States and they had experience in the American beauty products industry. They also impressed our end-client with their understanding of the project’s scope and goals.

How much have you invested with them?

In total, we spent around $120,000 on this project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from November 2015–January 2017.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Following a smooth migration, they helped our end-client launch their new cosmetic products. Within 8 hours, they sold over 4,000 units. We also appreciated their willingness to make performance tweaks following the site’s launch.

How did Drupal Connect perform from a project management standpoint?

Drupal Connect showed very impressive internal communication skills, which really benefitted the project. We mainly interacted through Slack, with additional interfacing through Skype calls, Zoom meetings, or Google Hangouts. On their end, they tracked the project through Teamwork. We used Jira, so we set up a middleware between the two share tickets. No matter the channel, Drupal Connect’s communication was responsive, collaborative, involved, and transparent.

What did you find most impressive about them?

As a technical agency, we look to experts because we don’t have the time or in-house resources to research specific issues. From that perspective, I really appreciate Drupal Connect’s willingness to dive into specific elements and ideas to find creative and appropriate solutions.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Personally, I think they should switch their preferred project management tool from Teamwork. That isn’t a critique of their management style, I just don’t like that piece of software. Aside from that, we occasionally had to review and refactor some of their work because it wasn’t exactly what the client was looking for. Our client’s appreciated Drupal Connect’s hands-on approach so that they could provide their own feedback, but it did result in some additional back and forth.

Any advice for potential customers?

I recommend clients have a strong understanding of their scope so they know where to start the partnership. I also advise that they plan ahead so that they can help Drupal Connect prioritize their work throughout the engagement.

BACKGROUND

Could you briefly describe your organization?

I work for a private university in Newport, Rhode Island. We have about 2,500 undergraduate students. We also offer advanced graduate degrees in several disciplines. We’ve been around for roughly 65 years.

What is your position?

I’m director of Web communications.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenges were you attempting to address when you initiated the relationship with Drupal Connect?

We contracted with Drupal Connect last July as a part of a website redesign initiative. We received funding in late spring to initiate the project to move us away from our proprietary systems. The administration and technical staff had decided that our earlier systems simply couldn’t meet our needs in a cost-effective manner.

Three of our team members and myself, are responsible for the external website and all of our digital communications. Work on the project began in July and remains ongoing. We went live with our website about two weeks ago, and we continue to be working on slight fixes and adjustments.

SOLUTION

Had you already selected Drupal as your preferred content management system before initiating the relationship with Drupal Connect, or were they a part of the selection process?

They were an integral part of the selection process.

Do you recall what other content management systems you were considering?

Yes. We were looking at systems like Ektron, OmniUpdate, and Joomla. Drupal was the one we favored from the beginning. While they were a part of the selection process, we had a relatively good idea that moving into open source would be our best bet. Drupal was our top candidate as an open-source solution.

How did you discover and select Drupal Connect as your partner for this endeavor?

There were two things. Firstly, we conducted some research on vendors with clients in higher education, and there were only a handful of firms with that experience. Drupal Connect came up on the radar for work they’d done with several schools. As an additional benefit, they’re also located here in Rhode Island, which was a key factor for us. We really wanted a vendor that would be able to come onsite and work with our team.  

Could you describe the scope of the project?

It was essentially a complete implementation; however, when it came to the visual design, there was considerable collaboration between our teams. They were responsible for rolling out the full project plan, discovery, building of the system, and support for our content migration and curation. Our team handled the creative and content side of things, and they dealt with the functional build of the site.  

Did they offer other peripheral service in addition to the functional build?

One exception is they did build out a responsive design of the website.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in monetary terms?

It was between $100,000 and $125,000.

When was the most recent phase completed?

March 28 of this year [2014].

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

I don’t have any figures yet. We’re still gathering data since we just went live. However, user feedback has been relatively positive, especially on the outside. Internally, we’ve had our own issues, mainly due to compatibility because we’ve got our own internal users of legacy systems, and that impacted some of the delivery of new websites for our internal customers or clients. However, from the outside, we’ve had great compliments from new prospective audiences, especially students and parents to donors and alumni. Things have been moving in the right direction.

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

Working with them, based upon it being an open project, there were some times when we had to move through a few more iterations to meet our predetermined requirements. That was mainly due to our different styles and approaches to problem solving. Working with proprietary systems, you get away with saying you know exactly what you’re going to get delivered to you. Working with an open system, you have to move through several iterations. By the fourth time, you really just want to stick to the module, but you’re still making changes, and you need to sign off and move ahead. It can be very easy to become tangled in an iterative process because you can dwell on a simple issue for a long time before realizing you have to scrap it altogether or reconceptualize the whole thing from scratch.

As far as the operating style and communications were concerned, they were always quite reliable. We met weekly, and worked remotely outside of those weekly meetings, just to keep the project moving forward. While we still have a couple of outstanding items, overall, from a high level, their effort was very accommodating and certainly took into account our ideas. They really strayed from offering us the platter of “best practices” and tailored our solution to the unique needs of a university. That level of service and understanding is extremely difficult to come by.  

In retrospect, are there areas you feel they could improve on as a service provider, or are there things you’d do differently as the client before initiating a project of this nature?

Two things come to mind. From a development perspective, we worked really well together. The project management was slightly lacking with regard to micromanagement. We were working so much on the ground level that there wasn’t enough attention being paid to where the resources were being spent. Some inefficiency definitely stemmed from that. Our budget-wise approach to the project management phase of things was a little bit to my disliking. We could have improved that effort by being clearer about how long things should take to complete, so that we could make line adjustments to make sure that we’re not wasting precious hours on exploration, instead of working diligently to meet our core requirements. The key takeaway on our end was to be prepared to micromanage the financial components ourselves, rather than assuming the vendor will do so in the most effective way possible.

BACKGROUND

Could you briefly describe your organization?

The company I work for is a producer of raw materials for a range of different industries, such as: bookbinding. upholstery & accessory, interior designs, etc. We use our online platform to market and sell our materials to businesses and consumers. 

What is your position?

I’m a general manager.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenge(s) you were attempting to address when you initiated the relationship with Drupal Connect?

When we first approached them, we had only recently moved on to the Drupal platform from a custom-based platform for our website. Drupal Connect was helping us remove the new bugs and teach me, personally, how to manage the site and the backend of everything. From there, they went through and helped customize everything and install certain modules that we needed to make our business operate more efficiently.

SOLUTION

Could you describe the scope of the project? For instance, did it involve custom visual design, backend development, training, support, etc.?

To start out, it was mostly backend, making sure that certain modules functioned, or that we had certain modules in place so that we could use ecommerce and process credit cards on the site and receive proper shipping quotes. Since they got that working, we’ve had them go back through and redesign our shop pages to have a better layout and improved functionality for processing transactions and locating relevant information. We’re hoping to have them help further by adding more content that we’ve already developed but haven't managed to implement quite yet. 

How did you select Drupal Connect as your solution partner?

I searched for potential vendors online, read reviews, and contacted a few firms I know that have done work with Drupal before, and Drupal Connect was one of the higher-rated companies that was suggested to me. I contacted them, and they walked me through what they could do, how much it would cost and were very flexible in being willing to work with us as a small company. I felt confident that they'd be able to deliver the solution we needed, and my faith was justified. 

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in monetary terms?

We’ve been working with them for probably a year and a half. I think, in total, we've spent between $15,000 and $20,000.

When was the most recent project completed?

I’ve had them work on a few small things earlier in January. The last project, which was our store overhaul, finished about two months ago [December of 2013].

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work they've delivered?

We definitely had a much easier time. Before they helped us, we had significant issues with people being able to manually place orders on the Drupal ecommerce site or get shipping information before they can place an order. They fixed that, so it’s become a much more streamlined and simple process.

The overhaul of the actual store portion of our website has been well received. People find it really easy to use, with a lot more information available, and a lot easier to find the products they’re looking for and purchase them easily. It’s been invaluable how easy it is to use our site and for customers to use our site. 

When working with Drupal Connect, is there anything you would consider unique or special about them compared to other vendors you may have worked with in the past?

As a manager, I’m also the head tech guy for our company. They've given us a lot of specialized attention. They’ve also been quite flexible with us as a company on payments and being able to do work for us within the specified scope of work. 

Do you remain confident that the Drupal CMS will continue to meet your business needs into the foreseeable future?

Yes. When we first moved on, we are currently on Drupal 7. I know when I first approached Drupal Connect, they said that Drupal 8 was coming out soon, but the way it’s designed, and the way they work, they would be able to keep us on Drupal 7 for several years and still keep it functional and working smoothly. They offered suggestions on what we could do and gave us options for the best way for us as a business to move forward and still be able to function online. I trust their assessment. 

In retrospect, are there areas you think they could improve upon, or are there things you'd do differently as the client before approaching this type of project?

They’ve been really flexible. The only thing that was difficult for us to start was they worked through Basecamp and/or Teamwork now, which is basically an online management sysem, and we weren’t familiar with that beforehand. It was a little difficult to go in and learn that in order to get things done. But, it’s been a decent tool, and we can go back and see what we’ve talked about in the past. I suppise in hindsight it was helpful for us to have to learn that regardless.

BACKGROUND

Could you briefly describe your company?

We’re a business services organization for natural foods co-ops in the United States.

What is your position?

I am the director of IT [information technology].

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenges you were attempting to address when you initiated the relationship with Drupal Connect?

The biggest challenge was we had a website that our developer was prepared to launch. We disagreed and thought the website wasn't ready for launch. As a result, we initially engaged Drupal Connect to do an audit of the site. We wanted a third-party opinion before we made our move. Our previous developer was also proposing a number of additional changes and features. 

In the process, we asked Drupal Connect to give us a bid on that work as well, and chose to engage with Drupal Connect to finish the project. Ultimately, when we began that engagement, one of the things that my director of marketing asked of the project manager was, if you were to build the website today, would you have built it like this? The honest answer was no.

At that point, we started from the ground up with Drupal Connect. The major focus of the scope of work is our website, which is primarily a library of resources for the members of our cooperative. There’s very little content that’s exposed externally, and we needed mechanisms to deliver that content to our users in a way that was simple and accessible. The constant complaint with our site from users related to being unable to locate certain resources. We needed to address that issue. We had tried to reach out to multiple positions within the organizations that we serve. It was clear from our user interactions that a significant number of our users were not using our website. That was really the basis for our project.

SOLUTION

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in monetary terms?

The site launch cost approximately $260,000.

When was the new Drupal 7 website launched?

February 1, 2014.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics or metrics that might demonstrate the effectiveness of the work they've delivered?

Every bit of feedback that we’ve received is that this is a spectacular improvement over our previous site. Our staff is extremely impressed with the enhanced backend functionality. Our users are ecstatic that they can at last conveniently locate the informational resources they need.

When working with Drupal Connect, is there anything you would consider unique or special about them compared to other vendors you’ve worked with in the past?

I would say one of the things that I really appreciated was that the project managers focused on maintaining parameters on scope. It can be so easily to let the scope slowly but surely increase with the complexity of certain tasks. They did an excellent job evaluating and prioritizing project tasks so that we weren't working on extraneous parts. 

I think that another piece that I value extremely about the relationship with Drupal Connect is it was clear that we were in a partnership. There was a point, I would say, four or five months into the project where we were clearly talking past each other, and we were not in a good place. But, Drupal Connect was ready and willing to engage and address the issues. I think, out of that, we ended up with a much stronger partnership.

In retrospect, are there areas that you think they could improve upon, or are there things you'd do differently as the client before approaching this type of project?

I think that, ultimately, we spent a lot more money than we anticipated spending. The only other constructive feedback I can give is that there were certain points that I wish they would have really taken our hand and led us the way we needed to go. While dialog is definitely important and effective, there are times when we didn't necessarily know what it was we wanted or needed. It's times like that in which a vendor can shine, because they're the experts in the field. We hired Drupal Connect specifically so we could leverage their knowledge and expertise. Having them be willing to guide is with a firmer hand would have been great. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the marketing manager for a B2B floral company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Drupal Connect?

We needed help in rebuilding and redesigning our external website.

SOLUTION

Can you go into detail about the services they provided and the scope of the project?

Drupal Connect included more user-friendly experiences and updated our interactive content. We continue working with them for maintenance. They make sure our security needs and features are up to date.

What was the team composition?

They assigned a project manager, a developer, one to two additional developers if any issues came up. On our side, two marketing specialists were involved.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We mainly used Teamwork, which we ended up adopting for internal use for other purposes. We also used Slack for quick questions and emails whenever we needed to loop in those that weren't on the other two platforms.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

As someone who works in marketing, I was most impressed with their level of patience, not only in walking me through the process but also at being willing to repeat things if they weren't understood the first time around. Looking back on this now completed project, I'm most thankful for that!