Building A Drupal Practice: A case study on what can drag you to failure

dgoutam

A story of an epic journey on the bumpy roads to build a Drupal practice within an Indian IT services company.

From the perspective of a practice owner I would like to share my own experience, which is still one of my best journey among many. In this practice building experience I rolled out a project costing more than $200,000 and still failed to establish the practice as a regular one within the enterprise.

In this talk I would cover the following topics:

  • Pre-context and background of how Indian IT service industry operates
  • Business Development
    • Pitching to the customers
    • Challenges of splitter strategy (customer engagement)
    • ….
  • Team Building
    • Chicken-egg tussles with CXOs 
    • Training the team – Top-line/Bottom-line
    • Java programmers in drupal world a messy menace of the enterprise
    • ….
  • Customer onboarding
    • NDA hell
    • Billing the customer – Art of telling truth
    • Duel for life for infrastructure, process and practice
    • …
  •  Drupal
    • Dealing with Developer personality of customer
    • Claiming the control of project management from customer
    • Negotiate to win the delivery schedule, estimation sucks
    • Module madness, hacking hell
    • Taming the dev-stage-prod and iterate
    • Hotfix and patch management
    • Early adoption comes with a cost
    • …
  •  Disaster on the way
    • Pivots are costly
    • Managing internal and external stake holders
    • New drupal version can make you mad ( sales pipeline goes dry)
    • Hunting without firming is not healthy
    • Java the T-Rex of Indian IT Service may become your nightmare
    •   …
  • Iterate
    • Challenges
    • Refine
    • …
  • Summary
  • About me
  • QA

Experience: Beginner, Intermediate

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Session Track

Case Studies

Experience Level

Intermediate

Drupal Version