How to Find The Best Drupal Development Company For You

Submitted by jordan on Mon, 08/15/2016 - 10:55

Finding a well-matched Drupal development company is like betting on a horse.

First you have to understand your own company’s temperament for which kind of race to bet on. Are you looking for a thoroughbred well-suited to the rigor of a sprinting flat race? Or are you looking for a horse who can take you through the steeplechase?

Steeplechase

Steeplechase courtesy of Wikipedia.org

1. Identify Your Drupal Needs

Start your journey looking for a Drupal development company by first asking a few questions:

Roadmap: What development roadmap is ahead of us?
Dedication: What level of resource allocation do we need from our Drupal development partner?
Expertise: What specialized expertise do we need our Drupal developer partner to provide?
Experience: What experience should our Drupal development partner have in order to qualify themselves?
Governance & Process: What governance, process, or oversight does our website and industry require? Does the Drupal development partner have experience with these standards?
Packages: What packages does the Drupal development company offer?

Roadmap

What development roadmap is ahead of us?

Understanding your company’s development roadmap is critical to selecting the correct Drupal development partner. While some Drupal development agencies may specialize in Drupal support, others may be a strong fit based on the specific kind of project you’re working on, the technical expertise required for a specific integration, or even the performance optimization you’ll need.

While all horses can get you from A to B, picking the right horse for the race can mean all the difference.

Would you bet on a draft horse in a sprint race?
Or take a thoroughbred sprinter to the fields with a plow?

Sometimes you get the benefit of getting your work done quickly… in others you lose the race entirely.

Guide to Drupal Roadmapping

Some items to consider when you’re reviewing the Drupal development companies:

❏ What kind of Drupal development will we need in the next 12 months?
- ❏ Support
- ❏ Custom module development
- ❏ Integration with a third-party application
- ❏ Project development (against a specific deadline)
- ❏ Performance tuning
- ❏ Security auditing

❏ [Action Item] Have a list of major features or priorities for each of the above checkboxes before you start searching for a partner.

Dedication

What level of resource allocation do we need from our Drupal development partner?

There are a few different engagement models to keep in mind. Depending on the timeline your development roadmap required, you may need a certain level of resource allocation. As you decide on the appropriate resource allocation and responsiveness required, you’ll want to consider:

1. Ad-Hoc Support

Resource Allocation: On request with some delay
Typical Engagement: Time and Materials

If your only needs are break-fix support and minimal new feature development—Ad-hoc, non-recurring, time and materials-based support might be the right fit for you.

Pros

Flexible ticket-based requests can be made as needed.
Manageable monthly spend for the budget conscious.
No budget commitments if your needs are small.

Cons

Without a dedicated monthly commitment, it is difficult for agencies to assign resources in a timely manner.
Deadlines are difficult to coordinate with this kind of agreement.
Ad-hoc support brings hidden QA and release management costs unless you conservatively release less often.

2. Deadline-driven Project

Resource Allocation: As needed to deliver the project on time
Typical Engagement: Time and Materials, Fixed Bid

When you have a major development initiative, such as a new website, a new major feature, or an integration—a deadline-driven project often determines the number of dedicated resources you must assign to a project in order to deliver on time. A deadline-driven project often hides under the guise of a Fixed-Bid project. However, you may need a Time and Materials agreement so your partner Drupal development company can assign the resources it needs in order to ensure success.

Pros

You have made a commitment to a specific deadline, and the partner you are working with is willing to help you deliver on that deadline.
You can ask for a contingency clause if the Drupal development company doesn’t deliver the scope of work within the timeline.

Cons

Deadline-driven projects often have tentative conditions. If you, as the client, don’t follow through on a client-responsibility, such as providing assets, access, or feedback—you may void the deadline delivery or incur extra charges.
The contingency clause will almost always be above and beyond the initial scope of work. You’re not reducing cost by including a contingency clause—you’re just promising a bonus to ensure delivery within your timeline. Be aware of the difference.

3. Staff Augmentation / Dedicated Resource

Resource Allocation: Dedicated Resources (like hiring additional developers)
Typical Engagement: Monthly Fixed-cost per Resource (Full-Time Engineer / FTE)

Depending on the amount of work needed, a dedicated Drupal developer staff augmentee may be a better fit for your company. This kind of engagement is often well-suited for companies who have their own Drupal developers in-house and simply need to expand their team with more quarter-, half-, or full-time engineering resources

Pros

Dedicated team members means you can maintain a known velocity (yay agile!).
Allows you to build up a history with the dedicated team member such that they have an intimate knowledge of the development system (as opposed to Ad Hoc which may require multiple developers to touch your codebase, based on availability of staffed resources).
Mitigates low confidence estimates for delivery of development work as developers gain insights through experience working with the codebase.

Cons

Dedicated resources require a minimum monthly investment—often over a minimum term (3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 12 months, etc).
Once your staff augmentation contract lapses, you may lose access to the developer who was originally assigned to your project. You can compare this to the value of having an in-house developer whose knowledge of the codebase is established long term—or at least as long as you can keep them on the payroll.

4. Security Updates

Resource Allocation: Timely security updates
Typical Engagement: Monthly retainer

If your site (or sites) are small enough, perhaps all you’re looking for are some security updates and maintenance. Finding a partner who specializes in managing updates is valuable especially when you have a large number of sites within your portfolio. Focus on finding a partner who can help mitigate costs.

Pros

Drupal development companies who specialize in security updates mitigate costs in the long term.
Keep your site automatically updated to the latest security releases and stop worrying about security risks.

Cons

It really is only for security updates.
Not for “that one feature you really need to get done because your boss is asking.”

5. Development Lots

Resource Allocation: For allotted sprints, in buckets of hours
Typical Engagement: Fixed cost per bucket of hours,

Looking for a sizable amount of Drupal development or support? Purchasing a Lot of Developer Hours may be the best engagement for you. Not all Drupal development companies offer this kind of engagement, but most will offer this in lieu of a Time and Materials agreement so you are committed as a client to a minimum amount of work.

Pros

Fixed cost out the door to have a Drupal development company start work.
Since the scope is limited, you usually have a good idea about the timeline.

Cons

The size of the lot does not guaranty the number of hours purchased will match your scope of work or list of desired features. Developers will burn against the lot purchased and simply let you know when you need more.
The lot of hours doesn’t guaranty responsiveness to your requests for support. A deadline can be discussed, but not demanded.
Most Drupal development companies keep the purchased hours on your tab for a 1 year period. Not forever.

Specialized Expertise

What specialized expertise do we need our Drupal developer partner to provide?

There are many breeds of Drupal websites. You may have a media & news publishing behemoth with millions of pageviews, or you may have an eCommerce site with a niche target market. The makeup of your site’s features and traffic patterns can help you find a partner who is well-suited to your needs.

Special Drupal Areas of Expertise to discuss with your potential Drupal development company partner:

Drupal Areas of Expertise

❏ Drupal 8 - Not all Drupalers are created equally.
❏ Decoupled Drupal - aka “Headless Drupal”
❏ Drupal eCommerce - Drupal Commerce, Drupal Ubercart (egads), Drupal & Magento Rich Content
❏ Drupal LTS - Drupal 6 LTS
❏ Drupal Intranet Sites - Drupal Open Atrium, Drupal Commons
❏ Drupal Migration
❏ Drupal Performance Tuning
❏ Drupal Infrastructure Engineering for Hosting
❏ Drupal Security
❏ Third Party Integrations - There are any number of companies who specialize in specific third-party service integration. You can often find them by checking who sponsored the development of the Drupal contrib module on Drupal.org for your desired third-party integration.

Third Party Services

If you are in need of Load Testing or Penetration Testing services, be sure to identify a partner who has Drupal experience. You don’t always need to look for a Drupal development company to find someone who is cost-effective and has experience working with both Drupal and your requisite third-party service.

Experience

What experience should our Drupal development partner have in order to qualify themselves?

Once you’ve identified the expertise you are looking for in a Drupal development company, you’ll want to quantify the requisite amount of experience. A single Drupal Commerce site in a portfolio does not make a strong Drupal Commerce development agency, but it may make them strong enough for your needs.

❏ [Action Item] Ask yourself the following question: How experienced do I need my Drupal development partner to be in each of our requisite Drupal expertise areas?

Governance & Process

What governance, process, or oversight does our website and industry require? Does the Drupal development partner have experience with these standards?

Depending on your industry and technical aptitude, you may have certain governance processes and standards that must be met. While many quality Drupal development companies can rise to the occasion, you really want to vet the Drupal development company’s experience with these standards.

A lack of prior experience can prove costly later on, and prior experience with ISO ratings and HIPAA compliance can prove it’s weight in gold.

Some key processes and governance standards to define before you start talking to a potential partner include:

1. Quality Control

What kind of quality control workflow will your site need?
What kind of quality control workflow has your site needed in the past?
Have you had an internal or an external resource responsible for functional QA sign-off before a release is deployed to production?
Is there value in investing in automated QA for your website? Or is your website simple enough that automated QA would be overkill?

2. Gatekeeping & Release Management

How many developers are working on your website?
Who is in charge of code reviews?
Does your site need gatekeeping in order to ensure a high quality codebase and high performance are maintained?

3. Security Audits

What level of exposure does your business have with your Drupal site?
Does your site maintain sensitive personal or business information?
What level of preventative measures are you comfortable with pursuing in order to decrease the risk of exposure for your business?
If you’ve never thought of performing a security audit on your site before, why not?

4. Load Testing and Certification

What kind of traffic will your website need to maintain?
Does the site need to be certified and load tested before each release?
What peak levels of traffic will the site need to support?
What critical pathways in the load model need to be rigorously tested? There is a difference both in cost and complexity between pageviews and cart checkouts.

5. Automation

The combination of parts 1 through 4 above will greatly affect how much automation you’re going to need. The cost of maintaining a high quality code base is expensive when you frequently verify new features manually and execute regression testing. Here are a few questions to ask yourself to determine the value in QA automation, load testing automation, etc:

How often will we release code to production?
How large will our releases be?
How many regression tests will we likely need in order to ensure a dependable release to production?
Is ongoing load testing critical to the continued success of our business and end user experience?
How much revenue could we lose due to a regression?
How much revenue could we lose due to poor performance?
Does the cost of automation decrease over time? (This relates to development velocity of new features)

Packages

What packages does the Drupal development company offer?

The packages a Drupal development company offers tells you two things:

The areas in which the Drupal development company specializes and has a dependable workflow and process.
Where the Drupal development company makes the most money.

Productizing the Drupal development services into a fixed-price package is often backed by some in-house process mojo that makes things both cost-effective for them, and valuable for you.

When you start working with a Drupal development agency in areas outside of their packaged services, process, workflow, or expertise—you can expect to pay more. Finding a company whose packages align with your needs allows you reap the rewards of well-honed processes: timely completion and lower costs.

Just think of the draft horse, caught in the starting gate of a sprint race. The horse is, of course, always ready to run, and it will get you to the finish line—but it won’t help you win the race.

2. Source References

After you know the kind of race your horse will run, it’s time to research the field.

It can be difficult to find the appropriate sources of information to qualify your potential Drupal development company. Many different sources of information are out there, all competing, all saying: “I’m the best horse! Bet on me!”

Horse Wants Your Attention

We see you, horse.

The truth of the matter is you need to be well-equipped to pick the winners in a sea of information—some valuable, some not.

Below, we cover common locations to find information about potential Drupal development company partners, and some pros and cons to each resource.

Top Drupal Marketplaces

Drupal Marketplace

https://www.drupal.org/drupal-services

770 Organizations
25 Service subcategories including Performance Tuning and Optimization, Site Building, Deployment, etc.
The initial landing page is Global, so you may want to filter by country if that matters for your organization or industry.

Pros

Drupal development companies are ranked by order of their open source contributions in the past 90 days.
Drupal Supporting Partners receive badges awarded based on donation back to the Drupal Association—the organization managing the Open Source community.

Cons

Some companies game the system and will purposefully inflate their open source contributions count by focusing on typos in documentation.

Tips

You can further qualify Drupal development agencies by looking at their supporting projects. The more projects supported, the better (as a rule of thumb).
If you really want to qualify the company, look at the usage numbers for the modules they support. If the Drupal development company has a lot of small modules—that’s not a strong indicator. If they support a lot of modules which are widely used—you’re looking at a company with real Drupal-chops, so to speak.

Drupal Supporting Partner Directory

https://assoc.drupal.org/membership/organizations

Drupal Supporting Partners listed based on partnership year.
You can filter by Country, but all you get is a list of names and the year they joined.

Pros

Organizations are listed based on how long they have been members of the Drupal Association as Supporting Partners.

Cons

This list has a poor user interface and so you may spend a lot of time slogging through organizations one by one.

Top Drupal Partner Portals

Acquia Partner Portal

https://www.acquia.com/partners/finder

Acquia’s Partner Portal has been listing Drupal development companies as partners since 2008.
~1700 partners listed

Pros

Featured Acquia partners can only be promoted within the listings if they have more than 2 Acquia certified developers.

Featured Acquia Partners

via https://www.acquia.com/sites/default/files/acquia_partner_program_faqs_v3.2_1.pdf

The Acquia Partner Sites of the Year program allows you to gain insights into what comparable brands and Drupal development companies are doing with the Acquia platform and with Drupal.

Cons

Many partners listed are not necessarily Drupal development companies. Some may be design agencies who simply partnered with Acquia for hosting and development.
Featured partners are promoted depending on how much Acquia product they’ve sold.

Acquia Partners

Yes, of course we are an Acquia Partner.

Acquia partners are listed in plain text, in an oddly stacked 4 columns across roughly 45 pages. Not the most friendly user experience.
The Acquia partner portal is ultimately a sales engine to improve Acquia sales.

Tips

If you find a partner via the Acquia partner portal, check out their profiles on the Drupal marketplace and other areas to further validate them.

Pantheon Partner Portal

https://pantheon.io/agencies/agency-finder

Pros

Drupal development companies who work with Pantheon will help you keep your costs low on hosting.
If you’re already set on using Pantheon and just want a partner who is experienced, be sure to qualify the Drupal development company by checking to see if they are on this list. You don’t want to pay for the Drupal developer to learn how to use Pantheon for the first time—there is a bit of a learning curve.
You can filter by City, State, and Zip—which is more fine grained than other portal’s simple country filters.

Pantheon Partners

Yes, of course we are a Pantheon Partner.

The UX is visually compelling. If you’re into judging a book by it's cover—I think logos say a lot about a company.

Cons

There isn’t a strong ranking system.
Partners who sell more are featured.
Ultimately, the Pantheon agency finder is a tool to drive more Pantheon sales (not help you qualify a partner).

Conclusion on Portals

These portals are built to drive business for the hosting companies—plain and simple. There is certainly additional secondary value to hosting companies building a portal—the lent credibility of a large number of portal members and the domain authority from linking out to so many different websites—but the fact remains that this does little to help you in your search.

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to finding the best Drupal development company for you.

❏ [Action Item] Start searching.

3. Search Online

Google it

Before we get started with searching, first we want to start thinking about what information is important to you. Looking back at your list of information and defining characteristics and needs about your company: what top 3 pieces of information are critical in your Drupal development partner?

What should you Google?

❏ [Action Item] Create a list of 3 defining characteristics or services the Drupal development company will need. These should be your decision points.

For example:

Drupal development company must have HIPAA compliance experience.
Drupal development company must have experience with security auditing and penetration testing.
Drupal development company must have experience with third-party integration with an EMR system.

How to Google for Drupal Development Companies

❏ [Action Item] Google a well-developed search phrase for each of the pivotal decision points above.

For example:

HIPAA drupal development, HIPAA compliant drupal case study
Hospital drupal security audit case study, drupal penetration testing
Drupal emr integration, drupal emr case study

This list is by no means exhaustive — but by searching for a company that has experience with your key pivotal decision points — you’re already 80% there.

Identify Company-Industry Fit

If you haven’t already noticed, many of these search phrases are already leading you down one of the best paths to identifying a strong Drupal partner for your company:

Identify Drupal development companies who have experience working in your industry.

With experience working in your industry, you can expect the processes which will save you money, and guidance towards solutions which will pre-empt hurdles they may have faced with another client in the past.

If you start identifying a Drupal development company who perhaps slates themselves as a jack-of-all-industries, be prepared for possible missteps. Keep in mind, Drupal development companies need to be especially large if they have staff who are experts in every industry.

The Value of Selecting a Drupal Development Company with Experience in your Industry

Development processes that are accelerated for companies in your industry.
Most Drupal development companies have pre-existing solutions or custom modules which they’ve used to help other companies in your industry with similar needs. Even if that solution wasn’t open sourced, you can expect a company to spend less time re-engineering a solution they have already built before.
A technology partner who has their pulse on industry trends will likely reach out when critical or important changes are happening with other clients in their portfolio.

Case Studies, Case Studies, Case Studies

When searching for a partner, it is easy to get lost in the marketing language of services and solutions copywriting. Perhaps the Drupal development company has a landing page targeted for your industry, but they only have surface-level details: a client list consisting of logos, some links to sites they have worked on—but there is no substance.

To really understand what value the Drupal development company will bring to the table, look at what solutions they have brought to their other partners in case studies.

Does the Drupal Development Company have Case Studies that...

Are for companies in my industry?
Are for companies of my size?
Are of a comparable technical complexity to my own project?
Demonstrate the ability of the development company under a deadline?
Demonstrate the ability of the development company under a similar engagement structure? (e.g. support vs. staff augmentation vs. project delivery)
Communicate the value delivered to the client during the project?

Sources for Qualifying Technical Experience

Blog posts. Blog posts of a technical nature that specifically talk about problems you have faced with your Drupal website, or with your industry are a strong indicator of the company’s aptitude for your industry.
Case Studies. Case studies typically consist of the Drupal development company’s most remarkable projects. A simple case study can be as simple as a portfolio entry on their website, demonstrating the services rendered and final product, or it can be as complex as an in-depth white paper discussing the technology used, the solutions delivered, and the constraints of the project. The more developed the case studies, the more insights you’ll gain—so take the time to look for strong case studies.
White Papers. If the Drupal development company has any white papers published, they are also strong indicators of technical proficiency. These are largely uncommon, as most marketing materials are slated as downloadable Content Offers and are not branded as White Papers, but you can still find them.

4. Audit Against Your Checklist

Now that you’ve done an appropriate amount of research and you have a few front runners, you’ll want to organize the vendors in order to compare and contrast their strengths and weaknesses. By this point, if you’ve started talking to some Drupal development companies, you may have already formed an opinion based on your first impressions—but we know when things come down to brass tacks at an enterprise level, you may need some more due diligence.

If you’re a small or medium sized enterprise, you will definitely want to have your checklist prepared before you start talking to vendors. The smaller your enterprise the less leverage you have to make vendors bid against each other.

No matter your size, prepare in advance with your comparison checklist to get the most benefit out of vendor discussions. With a checklist in hand, you’ll be able to have discussions with them around their specific solutions and services, gain more background on their proficiencies, and most importantly save time.

An outline of checklist items below is based on the questions in Section 1: Identify Your Drupal Needs.