How We Helped a Digital Agency to Grow its Drupal Team

Technology Stack

Drupal
React
Wordpress
iOS
Android

The Challenge

The client, a leading US digital agency based in Idaho, was frustrated. They had been working with another organization who didn’t seem to have the professionalism needed for the projects. There were difficulties with several outsourced developers, and many necessary projects were not getting completed before their deadlines -- leading our client to lose their end client due to these complications.

This agency found us by searching for “Web Designers” on Google. They responded to our Google advert and admitted to being impressed with both our professionalism and the promptness of our responses. So they made the decision to move their development work to our organization.

There were a number of challenges that came with this client:

Diverse Requirements

The client required a huge diversity of skill sets to work on the projects. Our developers had to quickly get up to date with Drupal 6, 7 and 8 and Javascript/jQuery, have a very good knowledge of HTML/CSS, work with responsive design and Photoshop, and design mockups. Plus, we needed to keep our Wordpress skills sharp.

Incomplete Briefings

These tasks were complex and required precise work, presenting a challenge. There is no proper document for such a combination of requirements, so we had to engage in several in-depth discussions with the client. In the end, we heavily relied on our experience from past projects to fill in the gaps and deliver a complete solution based on incomplete briefs.

Updates On Short Notice

First, we learned that the agency has several projects that require regular updates. These update requests come at short notice… meaning that sometimes deadlines were drastically moved up.

At times, their clients would call them in the morning and ask for something with an immediate deadline. So they would assign the job to us late in our evening. Because we take pride in meeting all deadlines, we would work at night to deliver it.

Rapid Scaling

Most of the projects were in Drupal, but we also had to support other technologies and tech stacks as needed. Because we often had short notice on these issues, we had to make additional developers available just in time.

Keeping Up With Technology Development

The CEO of the agency is a geek (like us!) and enjoys implementing new tech stacks, so he challenged us to keep pace and learn new stuff quickly.

Technology and Resource Scaling

In the beginning, we only gave them two developers, but within the year, they began to trust our quality more and more and assigned us an increasing number of projects and more complex tasks. As of now, three developers are working for them.

We adopted Drupal 8 while it was launched and successfully implemented it in their projects to help them stay on the “cutting edge.”

We also have also started offering SEO services, which they are now successfully reselling to their clients.

Thus far, we’ve delivered several interesting projects for the client, including the following:

CMS and Drupal Development

We delivered a custom CMS for a mobile app, based on Drupal, so that the content in the app could be listed, edited, and managed by its website.

iPad POS

An iPad point of sale system for supporting restaurants, cafes, and other small business types, plus the management software to make it all work.

Website

This was an information website built to support educators teaching students mathematics. It focused on the implementation of research-based instructional strategies through professional development.

Health App

This app to helped people track their health condition according to their food habit. It measured their food timing and regular health status “check-ins” to generate a visual health report for that day or month.

Certification Portal

This portal allowed the internal employees of a certain Fortune 500 organization to access their training. After completing the training, the staff had to pass several courses (containing quizzes) to get their certification. Staff members had to attend the training and pass each quiz to complete the course, after which they could then access their certification.

Resource Allocation

We ended up assigning many projects to a single skilled, senior developer who could provide knowledge and a skillest for all the mentioned technologies.

Support

We offered support and maintenance for completed tasks. If something needed to be updated or fixed at short notice, we could do it so the client didn’t waste their in-house resources.

Flexible Working Hours

To meet all the deadlines, the developers put in a lot of extra time outside of regular office hours. The time difference made it necessary for us to be online at night, so the client could get feedback when he was online in his time zone. This way, if we needed to do additional updates, those could be done in a timely manner.

Features

In addition to working on projects for the client, we revamped their online presence with brand-new technology, better UX/UI, and additional services.

New Technology

The client was running a site for years which was built using out of date technology. We upgraded it using Drupal 8 - a new, modern technology framework.

Better UX/UI

Users now have more flexibility. Everything is optimized for mobile, so users can now access the application from their phone or tablet, resulting in better returns for the client..

Digital Marketing and Development

The client now has development and digital marketing expertise and advice on hand without having to employ a costly in-house specialist. We also reduced the effort it takes them to keep up with the latest trends and technologies..

Cost Efficiency

We were able to reduce costs by assigning a few high-skilled developers to the client, instead of assigning multiple developers who would take up the budget and do the same amount of work..

Effective Project Management

We maintained realtime reporting with regular code check-ins and timesheets. Everything was done with complete transparency so the client knew what they were getting. We also provided daytime support as needed to address any urgent issues.
Because of the regular communication, we could often maintain an ETA of less than 12 hours for some tasks. The client could assign tasks before going to bed and then wake up to see things completed.