Working with the right Drupal development team can be the best way to get the most of your business's online presence. Here are 5 things to think about when starting a project to maximize your development team.
1. Prepare your Team
Getting the right people involved from the beginning is crucial to the success of the project. Normally we find that having roughly 3 people involved in the conversation is best.
- Stakeholder. This is the person who understands your company's business strategy and the vision to know where the company wants to be in the next 1-3 years.
- Marketing/Sales. Next, we want someone who best understands your target market and communicates with them on a daily basis. This will help us guide the user experience of the website.
- Website Manager. This will be the person in charge of the website, and our main point of contact that we can train and help build a content strategy.
The website you invested in is a living, breathing thing and deserves continual care.
2. Define your Budget
Having a realistic budget for your Drupal project is very important. Making sure you communicate your budget requirement clearly can help your Drupal development team maximize your budget for your business requirements.
One of the major benefits to choosing Drupal as your content management system is that you are able to get a lot of functionality with relatively low costs. It's choosing the right functionality to meet your business goals, which is what defines a great Drupal development team. It's the conversations in the discovery phase of a project that an expert team uses to help you prioritize the features to maximize your budget.
3. Define the Plan
Planning is by far one of the most important aspects of the website. The major differences between low budget development and enterprise level development is how they plan, and how well they understand your organization.
Being able to translate your business goals and how your company works into functional requirements is what makes for a great project experience. It all boils down to experience and knowing the right questions at the start so that your company delivers a project that is best for your business. This should happen during the discovery phase of the project.
4. Know the Development Team
Clear lines of communication are another part to a smooth development cycle. Each phase of development has a unique skill set. Understanding this skill set at the start of a project can help you better understand how your project will be run.
Each project we take on will have 3 major roles:
- Project Manager (or coordinator). They will keep track of day-to-day logistics of the project and making sure all the tasks get completed on time and on budget.
- Lead Developer. You will be working closely with the lead developer throughout the entire process. They will help outline each feature as it applies to your business model as well as implementing all of the features.
- Designer. The designer will take all of the functional requirements and turn them into a good user experience.
These roles can vary from company to company, but you should be able to get the picture.
5. Minimize Change
Changes in scope are almost impossible to get around. Having a plan in place to mitigate scope change is important.
What most people don't understand is the ramification of a scope change. The two major areas it will affect are:
- Timeline. Depending on how far along a project is, it can really increase the time it will take to bring your product to completion.
- Budget. When more features get added to the scope of the project it can drastically change the cost associated with the project.
That is why a proper discovery phase is important to any project.
Summary
An expert Drupal development team will help you get the most out of your website because they will ask the right questions to meet your goals. Forming the right team on your end can have a big impact on the project. Ask lots of questions and be transparent about your answers, and budget, so the project can have the best chance for success.
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Photo by Frederic Bisson