 Okay, good afternoon again My name is Alexi Manovich, and I am Drupal leader in my organization I've been working for us five years for building Drupal expertise and In my organization and today I'm responsible for delivery of all Drupal projects and Today I would like to tell you our story How we build in large-scale projects for large enterprises Which has own specifics and a few interesting things so Signed the beginning since the beginning we've been focusing on very you know complex solutions for 20 years We developed very different but all of them were very large and very complex and it was like a Java and SAP and Oracle dot-net and stuff like that so and It it would seem that there is no place for Drupal for example rights and for magenta from for any PHP open source here but everything in our world changed and Probably five years ago. It was true and there was no Drupal in this list for sure, but today We see a growing demand on the Drupal and Drupal like you know has broken into the development world on the wings of the winds and it become more popular and popular and Of course, I need to say that the great job was done by Acquia And they actually they continue doing this work by promoting Drupal and of course Drupal Association So they do a really fantastic George job and a lot of kudos to Drupal community because Without those, you know Thousands of people that this is all you know just impossible but today we see the trends and large organization considering Drupal as their preferred platform more and more and as we Were working with the large organization for for the long time We decided to move in the Drupal number of years ago as well and we see the strands so our clients You know key clients Fortune 500 clients and this is a really really large organization. They are well known. They are you know They are just you know Celebrated leaders in their domains in their area in their business and they What is important to know about them and it's pretty pretty obvious they have so impressive revenue and turnover and This is the the whole you know the story A lot of people working in this organization. They are pretty, you know well structured But there are a lot of things happening all around it's just you know The any of this organization can be considered in a small world with the whole infrastructure inside and so on So for us, it's a great opportunity to work with such organization from one perspective but from my perspective is a big challenge and talking about Fortune 500 companies from you know at the first glance it may look that it's just the companies and what they need actually it's They need time to market. They need quality. They need robust solutions, right? So it's pretty pretty obvious and it's true and also it's a I can add that They are very focused on innovation because it's essential essential of their nature but From the other point of view, we should you know, we should notice that There is a lot of money stock price and of course leadership and as all these companies trying to be on the top every time the cost of commitment is very high and If you know in small organization, you can fail something you say hey I felt this time. I am going to redo it in other way here Someone can lose his job. He has good place. He's good workplace. Just can be you know lost because of fail and There are also few few interesting things and which are very Pretty different from the small and medium businesses, which I would like to talk as well. So the first thing We see and we we face when we working with large organization is vendor management office and This is you know a department a group of people which actually make a decision who is eligible to work with the with this company within this organization who are not and You know from organization to organization power and responsibilities of vendor management office can vary but in most cases they still defines the rule of the game and Beside the the fact that they you know defined the rules. They are watching you They are watching you every time they get in your feed feedback about your job. They are talking to people and They are talking to you as well and they provide in your feedback and you ever you can never be relaxed because They are watching you every time and this is important for them because they if they consider it you is a Partner and would like you to work on their solution. It means they have some level of trust, but in the same time it feel it It means that Their business depends on you and they want to be very confident that you are doing well you're doing your job pretty well and The cost of mistake Next RFP you won't get you just won't be invited and You will do many mistakes. You will be out of the game and that's it. They're always pretty strict and straightforward The second important thing to understand that All big corporations all big organization have already their environment and saying environments I mean they have on processes. They have on servers. They have on solution architects and they have all engineers and What is important here that also they have on strategy and on philosophy how to build their business how to build their software which helps business and This is actually essential which you know sometimes when we face with small medium business We can come to them and they ask them to build website for example, and no matter it's because small They just asking you and they can't really evaluate how professional you are and They can't evaluate it from technical perspective. They just you know level of their professionalism in In IT is pretty limited these organizations are Another story they can evaluate everything and you probably can build a good solution, but it just don't rely Don't align with their philosophy and it won't work for both parties and this is important and Talking about all environment it means you have to be flexible every time and you can't just you know act in one way and Think that you know it every time will bring you to success. No, it's just important every time to understand what needs business have has and What I can do to do better. So you've every time you should be flexible every time you should adapt and as I said they have only environment on engineers or on architects and it means actually that they can design and build Quite everything they want they have enough skills for that the problem is that they often has lack of Scalability of capacity of engineers which can really help them to meet time to market and this is how it happens actually, you know this Combination of time to market and And you know this so it Leads sometimes to request such. Hey, I need a team of 10 developers of 5k a some some some something like that Yeah, and project manager and business analyst in two weeks and Yeah, and it's true and in full accordance with Murphy's law We we get such request some in a time and Both are important because both customers are important and they important for us They important for customer you have to deal with it. We can't prepare for that. But what we really can do We keep bench we call it bench. So we keep some people without the projects every time in order to You know to handle such request. This is very important for for us and Talking about scalability This is not just you know if we talk about you know building website What what is needed to build Drupal website? Well, you need a good Drupal developer, right? But when we start talking about scalability and large projects, it Leads to you know multiple roles and very you know, it's range where it's verity of Roles and it includes everything you extend design. It's of course It's Drupal developers the business analyst and project managers and testers and so on and so forth leading to DevOps so there is really great variety of skills are required and If you have a lack of the skills, it may happen that you just can't deliver the the whole scope of the project and The next one thing Pretty important to to watch organization It's most actually it's important to those who are working with large organization They actually leveraged as much as possible existing solutions good robust solutions mostly it's a services and today we have a lot of cloud-based services software as a service and whatever and If they see that some of these service can you know help them to achieve time to market They use it and for us for Drupal developers for example for for any kind of developers It just means that we need to take care not about just Drupal implementation, but how our implementation Will be integrated In whole infrastructure and if for example, we are talking about media project Yeah, so media project. It's quite everything about video and most likely they will be video CMS And we will have to integrate this video CMS like the platform like bright cough We will need to integrate with analytics. It's not just like to put Google Analytics JavaScript code in the bottom of the page. It means that we need to you know to Help to understand a behavior of user and we will need to put all the codes in the proper places we need to integrate with advertisement and Of course, if it's highlighted project, it will be CDM so content deliver network so and so on and so forth and the whole infrastructure in the end of the day looks pretty huge and This is very very important to be ready to you know to integrate all these pieces We have you know, we perceive all our project not all but most of them as product development and it's Look, it's it may be you know unique product and one of a kind but all these organization mostly looking on their property as a product and what it means it means that The development won't stop when you do release number one and everyone is happy It's just the first phase and this is the point when actually the game starts and then we will have to continue to make a Lot of deployments a lot of improvements because products will be updated will be evolved and so on and so forth and this is a long-term way and this is months and even years of work and You should be prepared that the the work will be not so, you know short term It will be mostly long term as soon as you will do success for with the with the customer and I'll say you will never walk alone and it's not about Liverpool football club. It's all about your competitors because you know place under the sun is cool, but there are others who can take it and There will be every time other competitors in this game and this is actually Good and I understand it why it happens because just you know a few Watch organization can limit themselves to rely just on one partner. It's just risky for them And that's why every time there are many vendors in place and you will be every time competing with them the the most, you know, probably difficult experience in my life was when we delivered a pretty large project with another vendor and The you know the team was organized the way when we depended on the vendor on another vendor The vendor didn't met deadline meet deadlines. What does it mean for us? We didn't meet deadlines as well and we were you know, like we want the pressure for the whole period of the project And we can't do anything with that It's just a story when our client in the end of the day say hey look you have to do the work What's wrong with you and we deal with that and it was really really difficult and Probably I would say it's obvious that You know all Drupal service providers no matter how much they are it's it can be five people Drupal shop It can be a large two hundreds Drupal developers company All of them are trying to do their best to do a great solution it's it's obvious and it's pretty normal and another story is that There are pretty lots of those who can't deliver it pretty well who can do quality and so on and The winners are those who over deliver who do a bit more every time and it's For large organization, it's a bit difficult for small organization You can come up and say hey your homepage looks not so good and we need to improve it and they can just believe you Here to you know to bring some new ideas to innovate You have to understand the whole business and this is about the main domain knowledge Because one thing is technology knowledge when you understand technology very good And you know, you know like how to build Drupal website and completely another story when you first understand business of your customer and then you do with technology what serve for this business and It's you know, it sometimes happens and working with large organization You're working just you know with small parts of this organization It means that you just see the piece of the huge puzzle and it may come You know, it may happen that you will spend Years in order to understand business well, and then only you will able to bring value Let's focus a bit on the processes site and in another important area working with the large organization and I Don't want to tell you about, you know How cool agile and scrum and I don't want to tell that you know Distributed scrum can be effective. This is true. We can do it We we and you know we have our blueprint for delivering projects and we actually you know use scrum also, you know scrum practice as a base of our you know blueprint but Here a bit a different story as I already said All organization quite organization have own processes and it means that Methodology and process itself is important But what it will be you know methodology it not so important because you can't just use one blueprint and deliver in one way In many times you will have to adapt and integrate with existing practices and existing processes and this will be essential in order to you know to to to build success in within the organization and We have to be prepared also to have not just you know knowledge of which artifacts we should have We should be ready to fulfill any gaps. We will face on the road. So as an example we are Providing, you know, we have Atlassian stack full full Configure it in well-set and as soon as you know our customer provide us, you know They are project management systems We are using them if they can't we just saying hey We have already set it up and we can work with it with our environment as well And everything should be ready because here again time to market is very important And if we will spend two two weeks or months to select the proper project management and tracking system It won't work and the process itself is really really important, but It's probably less important when you're working with a small team and your small team, you know Like they're sitting in one room for example, right product owner somewhere around and actually, you know Self-organization can be made on the fly you can just you know use common sense and If something doesn't work for you, you just come to your neighbor and say hey, let's do that this way it will work better Okay, define it and we continue in the different way but This is completely the different story and let's imagine that this is actually What's a pity it was a map map of our world, right? So and This is five locations LA, Texas, New York, Minsk and India and This is a real example of how we were distributed and there was 30 people working on one project Many developers both began to front-end many testers There was two scrum master overall project manager business analyst who defined requirements and all of them were building one Website there was two vendors in this game so and No matter which environment we use and here is very important to act as one team Overwise we can't meet the deadlines. We can't meet, you know, we can't deliver a boss solution so it should be kind of orchestra and What we should really do for that? It's important to define roles and responsibilities So who is doing what and when and why and and this is essential We prefer to start even right from this place and agree, you know, like on the bank on the back then There is another important area its requirements and When you have like like a small team you can be pretty flexible with it here you have about 20 developers and If you then give enough requirements to implement to 20 developers someone lose money and of course deadline so and requirements are very, you know important in the in in this case and it's Very important to prepare well right before it doesn't mean that we should outline all requirements On the first phase now, of course now we are doing it Internatively as we go, but it's very important that next situation it starts and you have all requirements ready Then the next thing is planning and I very like the quote of Benjamin Franklin who said by failing to by planning sorry by failing to pull to plan we have we are planning to fail and This this is great and I really love it And I really say to to many of my colleagues and my customers and we we do both Long-term and short-term planning. So this is long-term planning gives us important information about how good we are performing and are we ready to meet, you know, the our deadlines and the second story is Short-term planning. It's when really like in a scrum team team is committed to do some iteration work and They are really preparing to implement the staff and when the iteration starts They already know what they need to do and what they need to deliver The next important area is Transparency so no matter how much how many vendors do you have you have to be, you know As transparent as possible and this is about trust and it's not, you know, it's not happen every time It's sometimes it's just not achievable at all, but as much transparency we have The most success we can achieve in the end of the day Also, I'd like to to say a couple words about automation when you have, you know, like 30 people Working all together. There are you know in any project. There is some routine and if you will, you know work one year and You know, you will spend for example, I don't know one day to deploy something you will You will lose a lot of money and this is where we are trying to automate everything what is possible to automate and And again, it's essential This helps actually developers and engineers focus on really challenging tasks from one perspective from second perspective It's really, you know, I can't increase our velocity of delivery and the latest things I think which will be here, you know, essential I would say this is communication there will be a lot of communication and When we plan in this stuff, we should, you know, even allocate time that that time will be spent for communication But because when you have 30 people 50 people working on one project, they have to communicate a lot They have to be in full agreement and they should understand what they are really doing and if everything goes well I've decided to add one more slide just, you know, a couple days ago because I had I had one more meeting where we discussed the testing and I realized that when we're doing, you know, small projects when we have couple developers and, you know, product owner around It might be not so important testing because the risk of failure is not so so big and then in the end of the day you can every time fix the stuff, you know, later and also when you have Not so many people they are really, you know, developing things much better because, you know You can separate the task you can easy go in step-by-step and implement good things The other story when you have many many people working all together and their work should be consolidated And we should be really really confident that everything is working as we expect And there is no any other way to achieve that only We can use testing And by testing it means Free area of testing. It's functional testing where we're doing everything manually checking how it works The second thing it's automation and it's helps us to minimize regression testing efforts And the third thing of course is performance because if your Website after you will build it will not perform. It will be, you know, a pity story for all the parties and It's Will be, you know, sometimes it sounds ridiculous, but we are locating from 30 to 50 percent Of development efforts for testing. So it's a it's a big number, but it's really what gives us full confidence that we are delivering the good quality and robust solution and In the end of the day if you're lucky and you did a great job and you can have the second third Fourth project within the one organization and this is the good time when we can start bring a bit more value To the projects to to the organization. So what we actually do we allocate in We call it delivery manager. It's kind of program manager But it's important to have technical experience and a good business focus because this person will be responsible for Setting up the processes moving all the project can select an inconsistency and also he should understand the business and help business moving forward This is Essential and also this you know multiple projects for one organization They can be you know completely different story and it's probably not the case But sometimes it's happened that we are starting doing multiple projects, which are depends one on each other and This is the time where we're trying to negate with customer that some level of decisions We will make internally instead of going every one project to each to to to their product owners We are trying to agree in the in the in the bottom within our teams and then come up with a solution this is how we minimize efforts and This is the first and the last area of I wanted to talk And you know we have achieved such a success Just due because of people we are working with and this is all about Mostly about people every time we're working with large organization We said we have a huge demand we have a huge demand for you know for many organizations to you know to provide more and more To deliver more projects and to deliver more projects. We need more people what to do when we need to scale and and I Was on business summit and I hear they you know the pain that there are so few Good Drupal developers how to grow if there are no good Drupal developers. So We can't clone them right so far We even you know, we are not informed and we can't you know have people you know like in in Ten or twenty in just in one year, but what we can really do in partnering with universities Of course, we are hiring. This is this is essential and this is pretty common approach But the other you know the story is most strategic. So we are starting, you know we are doing pretty close partnerships with the universities and We wanted to identify talents right there where we were preparing courses we are doing training and we come to our In our universities and see the people who is attending there and right there We are trying to identify who is the talent and those talented are proposed it to join our company and continue educational process within the organization so at the next level of the of The educational process within the organization when people join the so-called training labs and we preparing the tasks with the Projects and the materials which very aligned it to production needs and this is every time where Where universities will be probably, you know less competitive because they are preparing a lot of generic stuff They're providing a lot of generic stuff, but they really don't know what is you know what require production What's really important there, and I don't say that University is not important. It's very important, but in the same time To prepare a good engineer university is not enough. So we are providing them very, you know alternative courses where you can when they can start learning the you know production needs and Of course, it will be obvious you will say hey, it's just theory and without practices you know doesn't make any sense and This is true and we are starting to you know involve our junior developers in the smaller projects which are pretty simple or for smaller tasks which are also pretty simple and the important thing here that there should be enough senior capacity to Help them not to fail or to predict fail in advance because even doing small project doesn't mean we want to fail We want to put delivery in it in every project. We are doing so This is this will require Capacity of senior engineers who will be working with the with the junior stuff Thank you. It was a romantic So and then you know like It's passing time and People are getting more experience and they getting well prepared for more challenging and challenging work And we are trying to provide them and this is important. This is where managerial capacity is important It's important to see if this This, you know specific developer can jump on the next level and start a bit more are doing a bit more and In a couple years those, you know students and juniors become developers who are doing pretty good stuff on really important projects for the large organization and this is doable and we You know accomplished it many times and we were was exceeding it This is, you know This is Pretty high level and this is completely impossible without some tools and practices Which we also use inside the organization and the first thing It's kind of acquies certification for Drupal developers, which we started to do a bit early even the aquia so we have our own position ranking and We have Defined at five levels of Drupal engineers. We outlined quite, you know all the skills they important for us and There are the there are guys who prepared even tasks Which can help to you know to learn some important topic And we you know we use it pretty much and this Everything is combined in matrices and they contains, you know, PHP topics databases front-end And of course Drupal itself and a lot more and this is how we Evaluate our engineers and help them to show the road where they should go What they should learn in order to achieve their success. They are usually pretty young and Usually they are pretty motivated to build their IT career and This is very helpful for them and also it's kind of automation for us So we just you know We don't do this matrix every time we already have set of questions important we're trying to understand what they already know what no and The second important thing it's mentoring programs, which we are employee to work with people strategically so Okay, this is on the on the previous slide. It was just a matrix, right? And what you can do is money nothing without, you know partnership with the senior guys who really can it will able to help you and to to you know to go on through this road and The feedback from senior engineers are very important So we are trying to you know to allocate engineering seniors guys for juniors and They get feedback faster and they can improve faster and they kind of want some pitfalls on their road This is Really really great thing and we actually use this mentoring programs not only for Yesterday's students. We also are when you come out there joining our company and sometimes they have like pretty solid experience in certain areas but we But they can you know have a gaps and this mentoring programs also helping them to fulfill these gaps and We know already what what we want to them and they know what we are looking for This is another great practice actually and working with large organizations You know every quite every customer wants, you know as we are very transparent They quite see everything what happens within the teams which works for for their products for their projects and Also, they you know from time to time you can spend you know healthy year working with Some people and you already, you know, you know them You know how to act and you want to work to continue working with them for you know for a long time, but We shouldn't forget we deal with people and Someone can get sick someone can you know just leave the company Someone can just get tired of the project because the projects are long term and you can just you know if There are a lot of routine you can you know just doing doing doing doing doing and then what and you need to You want to grow and having you know all these practices. We have pretty pretty you know really strong engineering culture within the company They all want to want to achieve something more every time and this is where Succession planning helps us. We are trying to identify replacements for our key people in advance we trying to foresee when the Certain, you know engineer will get we'll get tired on the project and we'll have you know different plans and We need to provide replacement as fast as possible because Of course, it's great to have you know the stable team And we are doing our best to have this team stable But in the same time the more important it's a business and business continuity And this is how we achieve in business continuity on our way and Also, I hope you know everyone agree that a person can't know everything. It's just impossible and If if one can't a lot you know all together we can and This is where some years ago. We come up with With a solution which really really helpful. We are as we are pretty big company We try to accumulate our experience our knowledge in so called Competency centers and internal communities the places where the people can share the experience from one side and help each other from Other side, so and let's imagine that we are doing some you know mission critical project and some you know developer face You know for example integration with you know some system and he never did this work and before so he can just you know spend a lot of time trying to understand how integrate with it and You know, but from other point he can just you know, write in the chat or write email and say hey Guys who has experience with that and there will be every time that this couple people who has experience and ready to help and come to with advice with piece of advice is or or whatever and they can also say hey I Try it sometime, you know sometime before to do that stuff. Don't go this way go that way That's really great and this really help us to not lose time in from one perspective and also helps to deliver in the end of the day from the second perspective and This is you know, I tried it it to make you know to interesting but it's still very high level and The the topic of working with large enterprises is really huge as and large as as the enterprises but again, I think this these things I just described are pretty important and they can also serve not only for the large enterprises everything here can serve even from small and medium businesses and and Trying to summarize What I just said and just bring value to your customer I'm just you know try to understand a bit more about their business and about what they are trying to do and not just You know providing them Drupal Drupal Drupal and Drupal is really great It's really providing a lot of things and we're considering this platform for many things But besides the Drupal there is a business which you know Drupal serves for business and we need to understand business first and technology second and in order to work with large-scale organization we need to be to be ready for scale and this is essential because They they can't you know just forget about time to market They have own competition in this competition, you know really really big and they want to be you know as fast as possible Be flexible all large organization will provide you different environments to work and They they never will be similar and even within organization You can see absolutely different processes different people in different ways of implementation certain things But it's just require to be as flexible as possible and to know a lot of things You know like your project manager. You are doing the projects It means that you have to know a lot about project management tools and not just you know I'm doing rally and that's it and The last but really not the least it's care about your team and saying about care about the team help them grow help them to be professional as much as possible and This is I believe you know, it's all It's business, but it's all about people the people build Drupal Drupal community is Is people and people helps us to you know to make our business successful and in the end of the day They helps our clients. So people are very important and essential here Thank you. So I think it's a good time for questions if you have any Okay, so we are trying to not To avoid, you know, like so stuff in the projects We are trying to consider as less locations as possible, but sometimes distribution can happen So but no matter which locations are in place and how many there will be, you know We have large account large client. We are working with there will be a couple of person Responsible for the client for for the work for the whole work with client will be on site person We call it account or engagement manager who will be Working right with the client in his field and from the other perspective in the delivery center There will be one person responsible for delivery. So he defines the processes He looked that you know for for the people for the team for the, you know all Implementation monitoring of the project he defines this relationship between the project and help them to you know to work all together efficiently This is you know pretty high level so sometimes we dedicate not only You know so called delivery manager or program manager. We dedicate also technical lead if it's you know There is a primary technology in all projects It's important to have someone who accumulate the knowledge and can you know Help to start for example project right to resolve some issues which may happen in in the end of the day and That's that's you know From the a bit high level, but how it works So when I said about small teams, I didn't I didn't mean that we don't use Testing for small projects. We still do testing and but I know that still even in large organization You can face some departments, which just deliver court and and that's it. They don't test it and It's good when you you know your team is so organized and so senior enough So they deliver a good quality in the end of the day if you will look a bit closer to the product and to you know Yeah, I agree so but Talking about, you know, probably difference between small and medium businesses and large organization I believe the key difference in the ratio of testing efforts in a small project ratio can be pretty small It can be 10 percent, but here it can be even 50 percent and you know when you doing, you know one of our project was multi-site projects Multi-site project with responsive web design for multiple brands So it was you know like a huge effort to test everything on different devices and we consider it only, you know Devices native devices not any emulators and so on great great amount of work Yeah, it's every time happened so from I will start from the end so from the cultural perspective We are educating our our stuff to you know with the Some specifics of different cultures the cultures where you know, we are working In of areas where we have a business. So this is the one thing and you know Even if you spend healthy year working with United States for example customer You will learn a bit about how they do this stuff also You know people are traveling a lot and that's why they actually have a chance to you know To come in the office of the of their clients and to see how it works inside so talking about you know distribution and This is why I said that the process actually very important So when you define the rules how you collaborate because that's completely right if you don't agree on some point You can because of difference in time zone. You can lose a whole day Just to fix small bar just because you don't know feedback for example, right? And this is essential to agree and for engineers, which we have it's very important to understand that there is someone Depending on you in other times on another city and he is you know, he will be blocked if you will fail So this is you know people when they start working on this project. They have you know Mentoring and we are looking closer to them when they grew up. They are you know, they just have it like a habit They they already know this environment and the standard Everything is important here. This is how it happened sometimes Naturally, but initially we invest in in order to you know to make this everything works And here's why the process is important because one thing is one developer will be blocked the bad thing It will be blocked ten developers This is you know, this is just impossible Okay, great. Thank you And if you want to continue with this conversation with me for some reason I will be here in our boosts free 10 in exhibition hall to today and tomorrow and Thank you again