 Good morning, everybody Thank you all for coming This must be like the graveyard shift after all of the parties last night So we appreciate seeing some bums on seats because it will be very lonely in the big room without you all here so We're gonna talk a little bit about Support providing support as a service why we think it's a great idea and and Hopefully have a little bit of fun along the way We have the coolest thing that I've seen all conference here These are microphones. So if anybody wants to butt in and ask a question Feel free because we can throw these on their light and soft so please do Jump in if you feel the need and and We do reserve the right to try and keep things moving along because We've a fair bit of material. We'd like to share So we don't want to spend too long diverting off Answering questions, but we will try and facilitate any questions that come along the way So so I guess a first a bit about ourselves So I'm Stella. I'm the managing director of AnarTech. It's a digital agency based out of Ireland and I'm Anthony. I lead the support team so At AnarTech we love support So that might be a bit of a this is the normal reaction that we get when we say that But yeah, we do and it's a large part of our business to give you a bit of a background to it Currently we have about seven people on the support team We have 40 clients and over 60 sites all on our retainer support model but I Don't know when was it about 2013 when did this all come into being when did we realize the support was really important to our business in 2013 at Drupalcom pride. We won a large project at the time There was only six people in the company and it was one of those projects that was either going to sink us or grow us It was like all or nothing. So it was like we have lots of existing clients. They're quite needy But needy in a good way because we love them. Yes. Yes needing in a good way So is what do we do? So we put five at the company on the new project and we gave Anthony everybody else so Things have kind of grown from there as Stella said it's now a team of seven and We're still trying to grow the team. We're hiring by the way. Yeah, if anybody feels the need Please do make yourselves known And Yeah, we came to the realization that Without providing a debit dedicated support service We were just leaving money on the table from a purely business point of view. There's clients there with needs and they want your help and It's might not be big enough for a full-blown project It might not be big enough to go through the whole procurement process, but it's regular incremental To give you an idea of just what we're talking about here The support team in our business is a third of our company and our revenue is over a third From the support team alone. So that is regular recurring revenue So it allows us to have that stable base and to go after new clients and new projects So what are some of the other benefits? Well, I find that because you're in contact with your clients Every day more or less You're building the relationship all the time. So when they Actually have a big chunk of work. They're more likely to come directly to you. So the cost of sale drops dramatically If for example, there's a tender that comes out for a big juicy government website It costs a lot of money to create the proposal to go through the arduous tender process a lot of time a lot of effort but in the world of support you're getting business all the time and When they want a new widget, they just come to you when they want a shop Maybe you have to price that but they just come to you and you're constantly building trust with the client Which just pays dividends all the time Yeah, it really does like Okay, you're coming to you with new projects and new bits and pieces But we can also go to them we can say we might have a load and say are you X team where we need? You know, we don't have a new enough work possibly in our pipeline where we forecast that's happening We can go set a client to UX audit and actually drum up more work that way And it works really well to fill those gaps in the main project teams Yeah, there's lots of opportunity And we'll talk about this a bit later when we come to talk about billing, but there's lots of opportunity to Well make more money out of it through that approach of being proactive and seeing a need that the client has and then making the case for it So what do we mean by support? Well my day today could touch 20 projects and it could be anything from Rescuing a disaster where on more than one occasion people have deleted user accounts and then seen all of their content vanish or I Don't know somebody's deleted a database or their server has exploded So all of that sort of recovery from disaster, but it might be I want to call to action button Or it might be I'm really not sure That I'm using features right can we have a chat and you can talk me through it It's everything from I want a friendly voice at the end of the phone through to Help me on the bed to die Yeah, so we do provide sort of help desk support as in how can I edit this page or can you edit this page for me? That's actually at the rare end. Most of it is we want a new feature or yeah, I've deleted all my content Yeah But then there's other things there's There's many projects Yeah, so Again this this ties in neatly two Different ways of billing because as a standard we like to keep it simple and at the The initial phone call where I'm introducing people to how we work I like to say you're just buying time. I don't care how you use it. I'm I've got your back I'm there for you So if you want to chat or you want to widget that's fine, but Sometimes particularly with larger pieces of work Clients want certainty or maybe they're their businesses require Certain dates to be met or Certain bags of money not to be exceeded so They the client will always have a Desired a desired future state they want to be somewhere to get somewhere and And they don't want to take any of the risk Pardon, and they don't want to take any of the risk indeed. They don't want to take any risk But normally we charge by the hour because it's easy Easy for us easy for them, but then there is more risk so With a mini project So something maybe 50 to 100 hours So it's not big enough for a build team But it's bigger than might normally do in a month for one client They can or rather we have the opportunity to offer them They can buy a Mitigation against risk If that makes sense, so if they want something by a given date We have to ring fence resources for that that costs There's value to be had in the certainty that the project will be delivered by next Thursday if they want a Fixed price there's value in the certainty of that fixed price and it's more expensive, but People do appreciate the value of that certainty whereas as easy as Paying by the hour is It can sometimes make people a little nervous When you're talking about 50 or 100 hours, but there's an opportunity there for us Yeah, and often we deal with corporations who we're dealing with the media team or the IT team And they're quite happy with the by the hour, but they've got to present the case internally to The different business units in the organization and they're not they just want a price and a time and that's it So the support team does have the agility and the flexibility to take on those Larger pieces of work that are too small for the project teams But still larger than the normal regular monthly support that we would normally give them But then there is also planned work and unplanned work and emergency work and emergency work So planned work is where you would sit down with the client at the start of the month and you know, right Here's your backlog. What are the priorities for this month? What do you want to get done? We have so many hours Let's do it Where is unplanned work? well unplanned work is That tends to come after you've done the planning with the client and You're going to do a widget on Monday and then on Thursday. We're going to Get rid of some rubbish. That's legacy code. Maybe But then Monday afternoon they go, ooh, I saw a thing on another site can we have that and then Somebody from marketing comes on and goes. Oh, actually. No. I want this thing, too So they've all got these conflicting priorities now and it's important to be able to push back To the client to go, which do you want first? Which or we can do these but I won't have this done for Thursday If you want these other things so that's unplanned work and then emergency work is Help I've deleted something or Payments aren't working or or there's a bot attacking our site. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we're seeing a lot of bots attacking sites lately It's also to degree would be security updates. They're somewhat Planned as in, you know on a Wednesday evening, there's possibly security updates coming out and sometimes there's a public service announcement But you know, it's still something that you have to schedule in you can reserve time for it But it's something that has to be done, but may not happen. Actually So it's it can be fun to try and manage all of these disparate pressures I suppose And the way we tend to do it is through a combination of Trello For the nice visual interface we use a Trello board per client and We use a slack equivalent called rocket That takes Notifications from each Trello board so any new card that's created any new comment that's created It goes through the flow of communication that we use every day So we're able to stay on top of What's happening and We recently introduced the concept of a sweeper role because if Everybody is looking at rocket chat all the time looking at all of these notifications. You're constantly being bombarded with Information and your context switching all the time So we decided to have a rota I suppose one person every week their job is to stay on top of rocket and To look after new cards leaving everybody else to look after all of the stuff they're already doing and That has been a huge success Because if it's not your turn you can just ignore all of the new cards Until somebody brings something specifically to your attention because it's your skill set or your favorite client or They're stuck and they need your help So it's simply about minimizing distractions and allowing work to get completed Rather than a whole bunch of different tickets being started and none of them actually getting across the line And it's it's it's a new concept for us. It's something we've only been trying out in the last few weeks months But it appears to be working so far similarly we've banned the a here in Rocket and slack so we're minimizing the number of distractions of just little queries that pop up Another thing that we introduced really or recently This is this is less about Minimizing context switching and distraction, but it segues nicely We set up a private channel just for my team called the bat signal and that's when You are working on a ticket and you're just stuck. You don't know where to go So if you enter something into the bat signal the rest of the team knows you're stuck and you need their help But it's only used in emergencies. It's not for So that's also working really well because you know there's a problem if anything happens in the bat signal channel so in terms of we in terms of how we price this and how we build clients and how we Work with them There's three different models that we use So we already talked about the mini projects and how it's a fixed price quite often And it's a fixed time and they pay the the extra cost to get that fixed price We're taking on the risk. So the cost is higher and Most of the time we make a profit sometimes though. There is a risk that you don't but then there's The kinds who just want insurance You just want somebody there at the other end of the phone Or the other end of the ticket system or the other end of the email just to Be there and answer questions. They may not contact you But they may and they see the value in that insurance and having somebody there And then there's somebody there bars. That's a question I was wondering how much extra do you charge for the mitigating the risk? Is it only percentages it kind of depends on the project But yeah, it could be we do the estimate and then double it if we think there's a high volume of risk Or we add on 20% it depends on the project as to how much of the slope We are competent in and also our history with that client in terms of how often they change the slope Or want to change the slope How well are there? Yeah Then there is subscription So most of our clients would be in a subscription module model, so we have Set packages bronze silver gold and so on where you get so many hours per month at the very basic level You just get support. There's no code. No anything. You just have somebody at the end of the line who can help you at the other ones Well, I'd just like to say That with the basics You're meant to just get support and no development, but sometimes we sneak some in I'm not sure I meant to know that On the other packages you do get ongoing development and new features and new widgets And how much you get depends on how much what level of support you've signed up to how many hours you've subscribed to Some people really don't care what the Okay, one moment. Some people don't care what package they've actually signed up to they just don't want your time as Often as they can get it. So they're nice clients to have Just to continue on that we have some clients who are on 16 hours per month and are doing a hundred and fifty If you have for subscription hours, what do you do with ours not used? Clients are allowed to roll over hours for a maximum Up to a maximum of their subscription so say you have a Contract for 16 hours per month and they use 10 then they have six that they can roll over But the maximum they can roll over is 16 Okay Again, the idea there is to keep it simple but Continuing on like that said right nicely from that actually is how does the support team know How many hours a client has how much has already been used how much is left? And also whether the client is willing to go over their hours like go to the 17 hours or the 25 hours or whatever It is beyond their subscription So we've used to it used to be easy When it was just me doing it all it was easy, but Now that it's grown Basically, we've had to automate Everything that I used to do by hand on a spreadsheet So we have reports set up that all the team can access that shows all the clients How many hours they've subscribed to how many we've done how many are left and percentages and color codes And it's a thing of beauty. I don't know why I didn't do it years ago because it saves me so much work so between that and I have set up a Sort of a board of Trello boards so that you can see every client and Each column in their Trello boards and how many cards are in each one. So it's easy to see if there's Cards waiting for deployment Sometimes they get forgotten about or cards sitting in QA That need to be unstuck and need to get deployed or a nice healthy backlog So you can quite quickly figure out who has work who has hours and Get going doing stuff helping people Yeah, and seeing what is there to be done and also seeing where the bottlenecks are quite often the bottleneck is in UAT Where the customer needs to sign off in it But The other thing that often arises is with clients that the they want to know where their hours are being spent So similarly to how we've built that report or dashboard of the different hours and the time Remaining for each kind. We've integrated our time keeping system with Drupal So we've been able to create all these customer reports and we've created a customer dashboard So the customers can log in and see a dashboard of all their hours and they can go back They can query last month this month custom time period So that's a huge time saver as well because you're not constantly asked What did you do last week? Can I get a timesheet report for last month? It's all there along with and it'd be interesting actually to find out whether clients Use this information. I've got statistics on how many cards get done a month and how much effort cards typically take I use it all the time for forecasting So when clients go how long is this gonna take when they've just asked for a ticket and I haven't even looked at it I can go on Average it takes two and a half hours to do a card. So it's gonna probably take two and a half hours And that makes them happy Because that's what it's all about keeping them happy It doesn't really matter in one way whether the website works once the customer is happy, right? So how do you keep them happy? Foot rubs I Say that jokingly, but In effect foot rubs. They want to feel loved. They want to know that you've got your got their back They want to know that In an emergency they can come to you and you'll make their problems go away That's the core of it The core of it is communication You have to communicate with your clients communicate readily when a ticket comes in you need to respond and say we're on this or Will be you know, that's lower priority You know, we're dealing with your other higher priority tickets first They just need to know that it's been looked at and somebody is on it and regular updates afterwards, of course Yeah, it is It's very easy to jump on each new ticket and Respond to the customer and go yes, we're on it and then forget about that ticket because another one has come in Yes, we're on it and you end up spinning 200 plates With all of these new tickets and that's where the sweeper role we spoke about earlier Really comes into play because the sweeper is doing that response is doing that initial triage and then Either completing the ticket or handing it to someone to get over the line and it makes completion a lot easier Because Until it's complete. It's dead work. So then there's Want to move on to talk about standardization That's a good one So we have over 60 sites across different clients We have projects that are on triple seven that we built then we changed how we were building triple seven sites This triple seven was around quite a while So we've got different ways of building triple seven sites and now we have Drupal eight and Then we also have the rescue projects that the projects that somebody else built and no longer wants to support or Maybe the relationship between the vendor and the customer broke down and we have to take over that and there are a whole world of special snowflakes So how do you manage that Right so Managing all that is hard so we've got I don't know seven different hosting platforms and including some self-hosted sites and six different VPN solutions and a Million different code bases and modules and it is a lot to get your head around So we try and standardize as much as possible. We have a thing that we call housekeeping At the start of every support project. We identify the things that just need to be done now So getting modules up to date getting say Hosting environment configuration Just so all of that so that we have access to all of the tools that we expect in our daily work So that it can make dealing with all of the special snowflakes easier When we do take over at somebody else's website somebody else's built We do a site audit. So this is privatized solution that we've we sell them so we Do two three days of reviewing their website how it's been constructed. What modules they're using we do a security review We look at all the custom code all the weird configurations and module combinations that you're they're using and we produce a report And we Classify in the report whether this is critical We need to look at this now or whether this is low priority It's just information for you to know about your website And from there we're able to sit down with the client to discuss with them their needs and what they want to achieve with the website And also discuss what we need to do in terms of housekeeping and to get it to a stable place that we can continue to support it Without too much hassle and that creates a nice backlog when the customer comes on board and then we discuss with them priorities and how to move forward The difficulties arise when you have a client who has limited budget per month But they have a disaster of a website So you have a backlog as long as your arm of things that really need to be done But they also want a new widget and maybe this widget Maybe that's a payment system or something and it's going to take multiples of months to get finished We have learned Over the time that it's really important to prioritize The remedial work before you get involved in any complex new stuff because Otherwise the new stuff just takes longer. It's more full of bugs bugs that you didn't create Things you don't have to refactor again later Yeah. Yeah, you're building work. The problem is that technical debt arrives in spades on Inherited projects legacy code and technical debt. It's like radioactive waste You can measure its half-life in years and it doesn't go away unless you bury it in concrete or burn it with fire I like the burning burning is good But the client doesn't always see The benefit because it isn't obvious. It's not a shiny new widget. You're Digging up buried bodies essentially but it is important to Try and communicate and educate the client on Why this is important and what they're get actually getting and how it will save them time and money later on It can be a very difficult line to tread between you have all these problems and we're gonna fix them and The last agency sucked, you know, you don't want to badmouth anybody But essentially you're badmouthing them just because you're showing all of the corpses that they have in their code base So you have to be nice about it. Yeah, and often clients Do feel quite burned like when they come from another agency where the relationship is broken down They're feeling quite burnt and by the relationship and they it takes time to build that trust up with the new client To show you're not going to be the same. You're going to communicate You're going to actually respond to their tickets and you know address their concerns But it is something that we have to work through that Show them that they are loved a nice quick win like if If you want to build trust quicker I have found Sure, maybe there's a load of remedial work that needs to be done That's got invisible evils that need to be solved But if you can do something like Give them a paragraph that lets them embed a YouTube video, you know or Give them a new call-to-action button something that is shiny and do that quickly straight off the bat Then they get impressed and they trust you more and then you can talk about Let's fix the load and something that they can show their boss or their CEO and oh, you know We've been asking this for this for months and we've passed it already Just by simply changing agency, you know, it does It does help that relationship and bond I'm conscious of time is moving on and I do want to talk about team So support isn't for everyone There's a lot of context switching involved So you're working with clients like 40 different clients who have anything from four hours to 32 to way more than 32 hours per month And there is a lot of juggling a lot of different types of tasks different projects Drupal 7 Drupal 8 different hosting environments So yeah, it's not for everybody and it does require experience you can't just join the support team as a junior developer because There's just so many different combinations It's just yeah, you have to have experience in order to join the team and be able to get into the the investigation work the detective work Yeah, a large part of it is Interrogating the client. I like to call it badgering the witness. Oh, we have a question. I was just wondering With the context switching, how do you build that into your Billing and planning because you know, sometimes when you have to switch you said up to 20 times per one day Now that's extreme, but yeah, I understand but that's sometimes my job, too But how do you build it into your building because it sometimes? Context switching can take a while just just to go from one and to the next even though What you're doing literally took two minutes We always we always round up to the nearest 15 minutes. So if something takes two minutes, it actually took 15 So that that's sort of built in by design I Like to think I'm good at context switching. I know nobody is really but you're better than most I'm okay at it. I know some of my team aren't that good at it so I try and shield them from it by Steering them towards chunkier pieces of work something they can concentrate on for a day or half a day at a time But a lot of the necessary context switching comes from Delays in communication. So if I'm working on project a and then I have a question It goes over the wall to the client and what do you do go for coffee or start another card? And then you can work on that until you have a question You always go for the coffee That'd be a lot of coffee Always go for the coffee but That's where a lot of the context switching comes from certainly from my experience where you are Waiting for feedback from a client. So you've got other tasks on the boil at the same time But that's again where the speaker roll does help because they can do that initial triage Ask the questions and move on. They may not be working on that ticket But they can come back to or you know when the information comes in they can then send it out to somebody else You will be actually working on it So Whilst it's a place that does definitely have its challenges There's a lot of satisfaction to be had in the support world because on a Project build team you might not see your work realized for six months Whereas We will crank out new features every day and Then you'll get the praise from the client every day and That feels good You get that sense of accomplishment of something's done and ticked off and live and If you like that then come talk to me Yeah, there's a lot to be said for the email from the client that goes Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're a star with lots of exclamation marks That feels good The other thing that you have to be aware of and the support team is avoiding burnout And I know there's a session like you're on today Thank you to have past 11 on Building resilience in your team and burnout, which probably work going to but with the With the support and and one and one and 20 to six Is it when's yours David? 26 yeah, the last slot on burnout and imposter syndrome, but the Where was I doing? the with the support team with all the clients and all the sites There's a huge backlog of stuff to be done and all of it is Semi-urgent maybe needs to be done sooner rather than later It's difficult for people sometimes to switch off to step away and though I'm done for the day I don't need to look at 10 more tickets or whatever it is And I think it's just being aware of that that things can wait till tomorrow unless the site is offline and the house is burning down It can wait Yeah the other thing to mention I suppose is the Possibility of feeling isolated particularly in a distributed environment because we're all work remotely but Wait, yeah, you can feel overwhelmed by the vast array of projects and styles of site and code bases But you do have to remember that there is a team there to help and with measures like the bat signal channel You feel like the rest of the team then has your back some more so it's less pressure on you Which feels really good flashback Friday. We also have flashback Friday. So this is another new measure that we put in place Because we're all techies. We don't really like phone calls. So we try and keep daily stand-ups out of our lives So on a Friday for half an hour we have a scrum like call Or a support group call Yeah So it's the format is a Thing that went well during the week and a thing that could have gone better during the week and everybody comes up with two things and the idea is first so that we can just know what people have worked on that was cool and Secondly so that we can identify areas for improvement And then work on them to make our lives better be it automate something or introduce some testing or The concept of flashback Friday itself But it's it's working to So I'm conscious that we're running out of time And I think we could probably stand here for another half hour and keep on talking But is there any last point you want to make or we throw it out to the floor for questions? I Need more people so come talk to me, but otherwise I Was wondering do you have a specific team for support and another team for doing project work? Yeah, so Maybe I wasn't totally clear and that's the beginning but when we won that project in 2013, which was a sinker die moment or sinker live fly whatever We did like it was just Anthony on that team And then it roots to people and then two years ago it went from two to seven And they are fully dedicated to support and retainer clients and the project teams are protected from all those little itzy bitzy requests from retainer clients So when you deliver a project built by your project members, is there a kind of an information sharing moment? There's a handover. There's documentation cannot say enough about having documentation But there is a handover process and a transition from the project team to the support team I won't say that we have it fully polished yet But sometimes there's warranty sold as part of the project and there's sort of a gray area there as to when exactly is it fully in support versus Still dealing with the project team But and because the other thing is because all our sites that we build internally are standardized and we have a starter kit And this is a way of doing things the anor tech way then You know, it's easy enough Yeah, once we have an up-to-date read me file in the project route We're happy We don't always get it and then when when Support tickets lead to a mini project like 40 hours or 80 hours is that done by the support team as well or goes it back to Generally and ideally it's done by the support team. I'll ring ring fence one or two developers to get that finished Occasionally we're just too busy with casual extras Because as I mentioned some clients don't care about their subscription. They just want more which is great so occasionally we'll get a couple of the more available developers from outside our team in But generally the support team would have the capacity to take on a mini project You know in a shorter time frame than a project team or a project developer would be There's there on projects for two three six months They're they're locked away essentially Whereas you've a bit more flexibility in that your projects normally last less than a day like the tickets Yeah, like the the subscriptions add up to about 450 hours a month We can do between 600 and 800 hours a month Normally, so there's room for extras mini projects and whatever happens Any more questions? Well, we'll leave it there. We're out of time anyway So if you do have any more questions you want to come up talk to me or Anthony afterwards feel free to do so We are also hiring for the support team So yes, please do come by and I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference Thank you all for listening One one more thing we do is actually prepare slides So we will upload them somewhere and there is texts on the slides too. We just never oh and flick to the contribution one It's not up in the screen anymore. Oh, okay come to the contribution thing tomorrow and come to trivia night