What Drupal can learn from McDonalds

What can McDonald's teach Drupal? With over 35,000 stores across 100 countries the hamburger chain is a model of consistency, innovation, branding, and talent development. So, you might not count yourself as a customer (I don’t), but looking at the McDonald business model can be a valuable exercise, particularly when it comes to business processes and talent acquisition.

Drupal 7 was released on January 11, 2011. As Drupal 7 matured, innovations through the contrib community made implementations easier by providing tools for a category of Drupal professionals called “site builders”. Site builders had existed before, but with Drupal 7 this category of professionals exploded.

Fast forward to November 19, 2015. Adopting a built elsewhere strategy the Drupal 8 release is state of the art, a command line jockey’s dream. But there aren’t enough coders fluent with Object Oriented Code to go around. By favoring the command line and necessitating custom code, the cost of building with Drupal has risen and site building has been on the wane.

As agencies and business owners we have two ways to create profit… sales and efficiency. We need to lower the costs to increase our gross profit margin. Can we stay nimble. Can we build with Drupal 8 and regain efficiencies?

The truth is, site building tools like Panels and Displays are very much alive in Drupal 8. Blocks are as important as ever, and the layout initiative has the potential to reinvigorate the site builder paradigm. This talk will take a look at the makeup development teams and the skill levels required to work with Drupal. We’ll visit how Drupal architecture and tools effect costs and efficiency. And finally, we’ll look at tools available to site builders, where Drupal 8 is going, and how we can become more prosperous by learning from McDonalds.

Objectives

• Learn from other industries
• Look at strategies for increasing GPM
• Analyze the current Drupal toolset with an eye towards diversifying the makeup of teams

Audience

• CEOs, COOs and agency owners
• Project managers
• Site builders