In our booth during DrupalCon Seattle this year, we had the pleasure of speaking with people in the Drupal community about our new Support & Maintenance offering. The response we heard most often was, “Doesn’t Lullabot already do support and maintenance?” The short answer is yes. We have supported and continue to support our clients and maintain their websites and applications, but never before have we intentionally started working with a new client on a strict support and maintenance basis, until now.
Over the past eight years, our primary focus has been engaging with clients as early as possible, often beginning with Strategy and Design and then implementing that vision with our Development team. We would perform or augment large capital web projects and then roll off when the project moved into a day-to-day operations mode, handing it back to internal resources or even sometimes to other Drupal shops for long-term maintenance.
Why Support & Maintenance
For the past couple of years we’ve seen:
- Increasing requests for smaller engagements,
- Drupal 7 and 8 coming to end-of-life, and
- Clients wanting us to remain in a limited capacity to support their team long after the site is “done.”
To meet these needs, we’ve assembled a team of experienced developers with a good mix of project management, front-end, and back-end expertise, as well as a strong emphasis on communication. Some of us have even taught college classes. We’ve chosen team members who are cross-functional; while they are experts in some areas they possess a strong comprehension of all areas related to enterprise development, deployment, and best practices. Surprisingly, Support & Maintenance has done a lot more mentorship than initially anticipated. (We love to teach and share what we know.) As with all of our clients, those working with our Support & Maintenance department have access to our hive mind, which includes the leads of multiple Drupal core initiatives, maintainers of popular modules, conference speakers, and authors of numerous Drupal publications.
Tools and Process
Each project and each client is different. For that reason, we endeavor to be flexible. Some clients may already be using their own instance of Jira for ticketing, some may have no ticketing system at all. We endeavor to learn our client’s existing processes before recommending changes. If there’s a process issue that’s preventing us from being effective, we’ll let you know and make suggestions for improvement. Some of our clients use Pantheon or Acquia, while others may deploy sites on AWS or their own internal infrastructure. Our Support & Maintenance team is aware of these differences and we pride ourselves on being adaptable and diverse in our areas of expertise. We’re able to adjust quickly to fit the needs of each individual client and project.
Next Steps
If your organization has worked with us in the past and wants to work with us again, or has always wanted to work with us but feared your project or budget was not enough to justify a full-time developer, please reach out to our team to see if Support & Maintenance might be a good alternative.