By Linda Watkins December 02, 2014
From time to time we like to share advice from our partners after they’ve successfully tackled some of challenges inherent to scaling a digital agency. As you gear up for the holidays and wrap up your major projects, read through and see if their advice can help your own agency scale.
On Building a Custom Distribution in Drupal
Weill Cornell had over 100 education sites that needed to be managed in a more streamlined way, so they built a custom distribution that significantly sped up their production work. Dan Dickinson ran the team’s migration to Pantheon and had this to say:
- Be very clear on your priorities. Budget, compliance, speed? What’s at the top of your list? Set priorities with the whole team before you start touching any lines of code.
- Plan for the future, but set realistic goals. A vision for the future is great, but you also need an honest look at how the web at your institution operates in the present. Often, people get hung up about what we want an idealized future to look like. But getting to that future is sometimes a political and cultural shift. Be aware of how different business units will react to change, and do what you can to minimize stress.
- Insist on actually trying the product. If you’re only seeing a tool in a demo, you can’t really get a sense for it. The key for any technology evaluation is being able to kick the tires. Signing our team up for free accounts with Pantheon helped tremendously in our decision process because they got to experience the workflow before committing.
- Take an honest look at your team’s capacity. For us, we saw a lot of value in not building a new stack of in-house infrastructure. Our developers spend their time working in Drupal, rather than on server maintenance.
On Leaving Behind Server Maintenance
Ciplex, an interactive agency run by CEO Zach Ferres, specializes in Drupal web apps. Ferres recommends ditching sysadmin tasks to spend developer time on client projects.
When it comes to complex web apps, time is even more important than money. Our clients are often working against an aggressive launch schedule. If we can get three more days to do development and push more features, our clients launch a better product.
When I joined Ciplex, we did all our hosting in-house, and offered it to clients as a service. We needed an in-house IT guy to handle all the stuff related to our Rackspace servers. Even after we started working with a partner company to do the hosting, websites still needed additional support. Our team did a lot of server optimization. Now we spend that time on developing apps instead.
On Trying Before You Buy and Starting Smart
Publishing company Scranton Gillette had their developers play around in the dev environment of their free Pantheon accounts before purchasing. Joel Hughes, SVP of eMedia & IT, says test the waters to get everyone’s buy-in:
If you want to get your team on board quickly, start with a free instance. Let everyone bang around on it. Once you’re ready to make the switch, don’t do your hardest site first—as tempting as it may be. Give yourself a quick victory early on and do an easy site. Then you can proceed to a medium site and a hard site.
For more on agency best practices and how to scale, download the ebook “Scale Your Agency, Rule the World”.
Topics: Education, Drupal
