 All right, it works. Yeah All right. Good afternoon everyone My name is Artem. I'm sales lead attending for soft and This is Anatoli. He's the CEO of our company where? came here from Ukraine to Feel the power of Canadian Drupal community because we have some clients here and we wanted to share some experience that we faced during our cooperation with the companies based in North America Maybe to hear some ideas from your sides how to improve all these processes and To deploy an external production team Okay, so as I've done said we came here from Ukraine and we are proud to represent Drupal Ukraine community It's actually we have an organization Published on Drupal org and there are 222 people on Drupal org already who actually has not only the company where they're working But also Drupal Ukraine community and they are contributing the support in different projects and contributing using credits For Ukraine the Drupal Ukraine community. So it's actually as you see the digits. It's 124 projects supported. That's a lot and only for three latest months there are 185 issues fixed by Drupal Ukraine community developers and this is actually low season It's summer sometimes. So it's usually it's much more and if you open all the Commits, it's around 12 pages So of listings with all the commits from Drupal Ukraine community and this is like, I don't know It's around three or four years. So it just was launched on the Drupal org. So it's actually rising and we have We also were part of organization team of Drupal Camp Kiev It's a regular event and that was actually our anniversary so we have we had 10th Drupal Camp Kiev and We had 390 attendees at this camp The majority from Ukraine but still some people from different countries and we also had some representatives from canada and there was a keynote from From cto of imagix from encore. So that we are really pleased to to meet our canadian partners as well Yes, so we try to make our ukrainian Drupal community international and some of the session We had an english majority in ukraine and russian, but i performed english If to talk about any for ourselves, so who we are we are Drupal focused agency, obviously we're based fully in ukraine We have 60 plus teammates and our main approach is not to work with the end clients But we prefer to help Drupal agencies primarily from western europe or north america to handle All the clients requests all the new clients requests With our help if they struggle with the lack of internal capacity and recently We've launched Internship internally where we hired like brand new people who has some basic understanding of php and we learned them Drupal practices and probably we believe that in six months we can allocate to them Like commercial project and they'll become junior Drupal developers. So we have primarily Meet and senior Drupal developers out of These 60 teammates we have 30 Drupal developers. So part of them are seniors majority of meets and we have some junior Drupal developers right okay, so We also wanted to ask You what are the challenges for agencies for developers? When the agency rely only on internal workforce, like do you have any ideas? Have you tried to? Do you have any issues or challenges working with only internal resources? Just rise again Okay, so for me i'm from the government of canada So hiring like a full-time government worker is like a very bureaucratic process And because it's a thorough government, most people need to speak english and french And so you kind of limit your development pool We do a lot of Okay, thanks Yes, what's uh, yeah, well if we get a client request for a project that we needed to start really quickly We don't know why it's not being uh the start of Drupal Any any other sorts Okay, uh, so yes, you are definitely right. So one of the challenges Capacity when you actually need to start new project Right now or in in one week and the customer is really relying on you that you you will start right away And all your developers already Engaged in project and you need somebody to join the team and it's actually the long process to hire And another so it's actually and when you try to hire a developer in your city that there is very limited the talent pool and And so lots of the majority of developers are already working somewhere and to To start all this process of hiring this is actually it takes a really long time and For some customers because it's also A challenge because Higher full-time developer and you know, you are not sure about Will will be will there be enough work to continue after the project when the project will be deployed Like hiring for just one project and then firing people. It's not a good way to to have to have business and also all this all the taxes and all the Additional spending things like you need to to buy a laptop you need to to buy Some furniture to and you need a new office if you if you already not have any any other space So this is the most common challenges that agencies face when they rely only on internal workforce Yeah, absolutely and Of course most of the businesses they want to grow their internal power But there are some cases when you have urgent requests as you said from the client and it's so harmful for the business to To lose this client and there are some options how you can support your business growth with external development resources and what are the key constraints when Especially business owners they consider The option of external help. First of all, it's the level of communication. We've heard a lot from Our clients our brand new clients that their previous experience working with the development partners They're pretty poor because they were not at the same page and communication level was really poor Second option is quality. I think that when you cooperate with developers from eastern europe Quality goes by default and we have a lot of ukrainian developers that work in Canadian Drupal agencies in us based Drupal agencies and most of the feedback from their teammates that the quality is quite great and if to talk about processes in the companies that The company that's not the part of your business It's different processes and you it it It should take some time to have the match between the processes and to synchronize And to synchronize all the processes make it the same as you have internally if to talk about security All the clients they're really They really care about the safeguard of of the data that they share with with the vendors and From our side, we should guarantee that the risk for this aspect would be minimized Okay, and there are options when you decide like you you need to hire somebody outside of your company for this specific project for for some specific time of Some specific time there are options. So first of all, there are a bunch of freelancers. There are great tools great platforms where you can find freelancer and you also know some developers in your in your city or Somebody you met on some Drupal events and So this is an option to hire a freelancer and another option is to actually have a contract with some agency who can help you with your capacity And what are the what are the Issues and what are the challenges when you decide between freelancers and agency? First of all is responsibility The main concerns that we heard from our partners that the they try to work with some freelancers and Somewhere in between of the project that this freelancer is gone and this is the the Most important issues that you rely on on somebody and if this person actually gone you you need to start all the process again to check To interview to check the quality of this specific person and this is actually and Could be really harmful for your organization because you already have the contract with your customer You need to deliver the projects in time when you When you start a communication with agency the responsibility for Not to be in loss is a little bit higher because you actually have the contract with organization with And and the organization actually has More resources and if somebody gone it could be whatever reason The person who might change the plans and might go to work with jumlah or maybe he wants to switch to larwell Or he just fell in and the agency always has somebody to as a backup to help So this is really Much more flexible and in terms of risks This is again about not being lost, but also when you need When you understand that you need more more people To to join your team like the customer Asked us that we need to deploy the project One months earlier and you need somebody to to help you to fit this new deadline. This is Sometimes you can just rely on the contract, but sometimes it's good to have somebody who can Join your team Right like on the next week and help you to to bring this in life. So There are always in the pros and cons in When you go to with one direction or another so this is Something you need to take in mind And if to talk about the small triple agencies when I mean small it's starting from one man shop up to 10 people It's always an issue with internal resources and brand new clients. It's so crucial for your company prosperity and what are the main issues that business owners of small companies faces with first of all These founders they're in charge of everything and they should handle all the processes because they don't have other people to managers I mean Those people they should be in charge of project management. They even develop some some of these projects and they should Do some sales efforts to make this company grow, right? And if to talk about new business opportunities when when those owners they Struggle with these internal activities. They just don't have enough time to Push a lot of efforts and bring new clients to their company If to talk about operations consultancy if you have a small business, you don't have enough experience to figure out what what internal processes should be and When you ask another agency that is much Much bigger for the help These agencies they can help you to build these processes and to share their experience In internal iteration between different departments of the company Okay, and there are always some choices for Different approach of work. You can rely on your partner on your external development team as You can share the full project with all the activities starting from design and finishing with deployment or you can actually Get some workforce like developers who actually understand to what exactly You need for this project and they have enough skill set to to work with you and can they can handle your operations This is also an option. So if we compare a fixed price model with dedicated teams, there are also pros and cons and when we talk about risks and The majority of risks when you go with fixed price is on vendor side and When you Have a dedicated model the risk are being share it with a customer and risk and control this is always on This is more on on your side and you can actually control the velocity of the team you can control the direction of the way the project is going and But this is also Depend on what the project is if if you have fixed scope and you have a really Small amount of time to work on this project and you need somebody to help this project being done It's just not really complex Not the not the project or from your key customers. You can just share this project to somebody to make it To make it done and when you have some flexible scope of work and you work In a agile way with your customer and you also need this flexibility in terms of budget scope and time and team So you can actually rely on Dedicated team model sometimes there is another model as time and materials when you just pay only for hours spent and this is Also works pretty really good and you have your management stuff. You have your quality assurance and you have your processes in place and this is really nice model and actually in the long run this Dedicated team could be as a part of your organization, but it's just sitting in another office and As I mentioned the client involvement is also different for a fixed price model It's actually only acceptance period when you have The complete project and you accept it if it is Good or if something needs to be finished and if you Dedicated team your client the moment your involvement is The most of you you in the whole process And change change requirements. This is always Being placed in every project if you have any change requests from the customer There is always negotiation process if With fixed price model and it's much more flexible if you work in a dedicated team model Yeah, just wanted to add to the previous slide when you start cooperation with brand new development partner And and you decide to share the full project the level of risk that You might have is really high and In most cases I hear from potential clients that They have internal policy not to share the project at the same time You can just hire developers from other agencies and leave all the internal processes all the Drupal approach All the ways on your side And in this case you just have addition to your internal capacity and Those tasks those issues they will be done Based on your internal flow And actually we had in our title at the very beginning Mentioned about case study and we wanted to share some Some experience that we had not so far with one of our California based clients Not to tell it on the words but to give you some examples at the same time I think that you're aware that in our business most of our projects we have under a day That's why we don't have like the actual pictures of the website or something but we're More than happy to share some internal technical and business Insights that we had during this project. So as I mentioned this client based in california And the industry that they have it's in beauty in cosmetics And this is just e-commerce startup Yes, they have we met them actually while on Drupal con Nashville this spring and They come they come to they went to To find the partner who can actually help them with the development and They already have a poor experience with working with other development partner from From asia. I believe the previous platform was based in junna. Yes, sometimes it's happened and That when then the customer decided to find somebody who can actually Who is Who can be in charge of all the technical process and he found the local CTO who is in charge of development and we have enough luck that this This particular person is a Drupal developer and that's why he actually Decided to switch the whole platform to Drupal and then they went to Drupal con to find a partner to work with and And as as it always happened in business They had a really strict deadline because they need to rewrite the whole platform To a new one and they have a lot of functionality in mind to to be deployed and that's why And they actually the it is for working business. That's why they their customers were waiting for some functionality to to work with that this is actually like a network of different suppliers of Of the cosmetics and they this is actually the portal who is who counts the money and That is that was a huge challenge They need to find some reliable partner who is experienced enough not only perform the development but also think about the money and This the security level That is related to this matter Yeah, and uh, ultimately they chose Our company and why we think they chose first of all they had strong requirements to choose Drupal Drupal focused company Drupal experts and We ensured that based on the interviews that these clients had with our Drupal developers They also wanted this provider to be able to scale the internal team And initially we started with one developer and after that during the sprints we added more and more developers and They also required not only the development mindset, but also solution orientation and business That's why we also attract not only developers, but account managers project coordinators who communicate directly with the client and listen to the business goals of this startup and They try to pre-frice all these business goals To to the development solutions from our side. So ultimately our developers they realize all these business opportunities to the features to the development aspects and bring it to life What is the solution the solution that we offer as we already mentioned we offer them to hire a dedicated team and The the first process was interviewing the developers that fit the most so we had in place we Team onboarding smooth to the team onboarding process when we started with first developer then in two weeks They wanted to get another developer to join to to make a velocity higher and the project monetization best Based on the quick launch was Really important for them because they wanted to not not to make it like perfectly this as it is startups They wanted to launch it in the most efficient way So they actually can get monetization processes up and running and the most important was that we actually allows the customer to To meet their business goals because they wanted they had such a big process of challenges and problems with technology and they think about a lot of about the technology, but not about the business You have to talk about the current status Do you remember that we've started on louis one developer at this time we have five full-time developers Additionally, we have project manager and tester So we have some scope of work that was previously released. That's why we provide maintenance services and at the same time We receive on the regular basis brand new requirements So we realize them and apply to the live website And we also experience the business growth So potentially we will have the extension of the Company and we also guaranteed the extension of the clients incoming to the To our clients business Yeah, and what are the perspectives that clients share already with us they they actually started to think about scalability of their business and they are Always wanted to go international. So this is actually u.s. based company and u.s. Market is pretty huge to handle but they already think about about South America about Europe and they actually now they have new New user stories and new functionalities that should be placed to work or to go to international market and that we always Take in mind that the development team is flexible. So yeah when the When the picks when the new functionality arise so we can add Another developer to to help the team and if they Is a There are some major feature already released that we can make the team smaller to handle the project maintenance and just to to work on ongoing tasks and Now a business owner There are actually two business owners and one of them was always involved in day-to-day operations and since thinking about How actually All the Calculations should be done and there there was a lot of calculations were Made in google spreadsheets and now they are As soon as they automated this process, they actually can think about the business development and And now they the client customers already shared that they expected to have An order from china with the production In six months, but they already made this order because all the all the goods were already sold out Yeah, and to sum up briefly let's mention that you become This customer if you are not a business owner And how it goes to tending for some for the very beginning you as a customer You'll want brand new project and after that you check internally That you don't that you cannot handle it inside the company And this is actually the place for us to help From the very beginning we'd like to receive from our clients request for proposal including all the information that you have from the initial request and uh After that we provide you the proposal which contains detailed estimation spreadsheet with all the budget and hours allocation for each specific feature timeline and budget for the project in total After that we usually sign basic documents Which contains of contracts SOW it's additional agreement for the specific project and NDA is for you to be secured for the copyrights After that we start the development phase itself and all the communication goes between The client and either project manager or developer directly After that not after that during all the processes our clients even if we cooperate on the fixed cost projects They are active or watcher They attend study schools on the regular basis and they are more than available to apply some adjustments during the development phase as well As soon as we deliver the project we also provide post-production support and maintenance Not only hosting services, but also adding of Some additional functionality to the project and After that after the repetition of this circle for several times. We believe that We we build The trust between our agencies and we become trusted development partners So the ultimate goal of our collaboration with Drupal agencies is to build trusted development partnership And not only in cases when you face the lack of internal resources, but on the regular basis Combining like internal growth of resources and usage of development partners grows your Guarantees the growth of your Drupal business Yeah, let me add to this slide as well. So actually You can rely on your partner on your external development partner Not only when you have all documentation In place when you have all the requirements and all the design of wireframes The best way is to involve the partner on the very beginning when you just have decision from the customer or in the process of negotiations when you Talk to the customer about the new project and there is a really Long path to To actually start the development before that you need to have a really good discovery phase to understand the needs of the Of the customer to build the wireframes to build the the user juniors and understand what exactly the projects should be This time a lot of migrations and a great Being in place and There is also a really good Uh Processes could be and efforts could be done on your external partner side So you can communicate more with your customer and the work could be done on the other side And to have some kind of conclusions, uh, the main ideas that we had for this session is it's You just never you you should have not to to close the door for any opportunities opportunities because the new projects That comes in from the customers from your inbound marketing. Uh, you can Sometimes deny this projects, but you never know what exactly this business Grow what exactly this request could be at the Final phase. So when you have new opportunities, you can talk to Other agencies and to collaborate. So success is possible only with collaboration This is the same as like you you work Only as a single person and you do all the process Yourself or you have some teammates and you this is the same as say you you have your internal resources in your Agency and collaboration with other with other people could could bring your business to the next level Uh, but the really important point is try carefully Don't put all all the x in one basket. Don't allow don't just trust from the first world you need to actually to try To try for us to make some trial period to to launch some small projects beforehand So if you actually expect that in the next Quarter you will have more projects you need to prepare beforehand to have some Test assignments and understand If this if this agency if these people are actually reliable if they deliver the results that they're saying about So try try carefully, but still Expect that collaboration can bring you More benefits Yeah, and this is pretty it in terms of the presentation I hope you guys enjoyed not only the decision makers the business owners Maybe for the developers it was also topical, especially if you work with Developers from other agencies outside of your company and you face those issues on the regular basis Maybe some of our thoughts they were interesting for you and you can apply it on your Daily basis workflow Please if you have any questions any topical information do not hesitate to contact us At this email and if you have some Current questions will be happy to answer Place we ask our partner to share the Knowledge base and the workflows that they already have in their company because like We need to understand the expectation in the first place And we also Need to use the tools that they already they already use like if they use jira and they use slack internally So they we need also the profiles for the development team to join this channel these teams and Get acquaintance with all the documentation with all the workflow that is already in them In this agency sometimes if the agency is small as we mentioned beforehand The some collaboration processes could not be managed yet Like because they don't didn't need this They just want the project and work with ftp sometimes this actually happened and we still fighting with one of them customer to bring get in place and because Working on the production environment via ftp. It's not the best way and Yes, so this is where we can help with Setting up some processes some continuous integration to be to have some auto deployments not to waste time for manual deployments and merging So yeah, so first of all we try to Get information from the customer and understand what is What is the tool set what is the processor is good for for them? And then we can consult What the best practices we have internally and what the best practices we have from the other customers and Yeah, we set up regular calls so it's actually And day-to-day meetings Discussing the project and also when we have some sprints Sprint sprint planning and also acceptance demos. So this is actually mostly it's going we are Google meets or google handouts or skype for business or just the regular skype So this is not a big problem. Sometimes Our customers expect to ask to go away to their office and to Collaborate the in face-to-face. This is also possible So but the online tools are pretty good enough to for this moment to to help all everything remotely and like for our It's before for our agency. We also have like remote first culture. So we don't We try not to stick our our team to the to the offices We actually have two offices in Harkin and Lusk and this is around 700 kilometers from between the cities So we actually have all these processes in place when we develop the whole project internally So yeah remote culture is pretty flexible Yeah, for this specific customer, we have a product owner on the customer side. So they actually have Three people from the core team. So there is a business owner There is a product owner who is talking about the features and accepting the features and the ideas of the project And there is still a cto who is actually taking care about the technology is The in is in the ways that they need and from our side, it is five If I do five full-time developers, we have a team lead who is managing our development team and talks primarily with product owner and cto and getting The decision about how how it should be how it should be done And we have project manager who helps to organize all the process the ticketing system and Deliverables to be done and we have a tester who who check everything if it is actually working as expected and it's Builders designed This is the structure of the team So my commission testing or manual testing? For this moment, it's only manual testing. So we have compatibility testing. We have functional testing and The optimization testing is like in the future release Yeah, this is The for this session is a bit confusing We talk more about the collaboration with end customer and this is not a regular practice for for us We primarily working with agencies. That's why the circle is The most common examples that we tend to have with all our customers because we came We start collaboration with some agency and if we Have a successful project And for the first project then we can Circle back and do more and more projects and set up more more teams and development So this is the key for us to make it not as a pass but as a circle Can you ask the questions? All right, then thanks a lot for your time here. It was really a pleasure to perform at Drupal morse It's our first experience here And you guys very welcome to ukraine and drupal events as well. Why not? Thanks a lot. Thanks