We were about 60 owners and executives of European Drupal companies that meet at Microsoft's premises at Schipol airport outside of Amsterdam. From NodeOne, Fabian von Tiedemann and I was attending. The subject for the meetup was business processes in Drupal companies.
Open space sessions
The conference used the open-space technology, which means that anybody can suggest a topic around which interested are gathered to discuss it for about an hour. Indeed, many interesting topics were discussed, ranging from growing a company from 10 to 50 people, human resource management, and project administration, to requirement gathering, service level agreements (SLA), and Drupal Association's role in the Drupal business world.
Agile contracts
One of the topics I suggested was how to write agile contracts. Crucial for an agile project is that the client understands why the end result cannot, and shall not, be fully defined upfront, and that they trust the method to give them the wanted result within budget and/or time constraints. Many clients say they understand this, but act as if they don't. After years of trial and error, NodeOne has found a way of managing projects that makes clients trust us to do their web project without specifications, acceptance periods and fixed price. The NodeOne Way starts with a breakdown of the wanted business or organizational value into roles delivering that value, and continues with identifying their needs. The needs are expressed as epics (i.e. broad user stories), feeding our agile project management method which is Scrum with a dash of Kanban.
At one of the sittings I mentioned that NodeOne have developed a new contract that makes it quite easy to convince clients to let go of specifications, acceptance periods and fixed price and instead embrace a truly agile approach. My bold statement created a lot of interest, so I was asked to propose a session about agile contracts. Really many of the attendees (it felt as almost all of them) participated in the very interesting discussion that followed my brief presentation of our approach. In the beginning there were many critical questions, as our approach seems too good to be true. But as the questions were answered, I think everybody (possible with one exception) was convinced that it's actual doable. It was very good for Fabian and me to be part of this discussion, since it gave us lot of new insights and ideas that we will use to perfect our approach.
There is nothing magical with our new contract, yet it has revolutionized NodeOne's way of doing business. With help of the contract, we have been able to switch from the semi-waterfall-semi-agile approach that most Drupal shops seems to follow to a truly agile way of doing projects. To be honest, I'm surprised myself, and it's not until recently I start to understand why the quite simple contract is so powerful. This understanding has triggered me to ask our lawyer to improve the contract further. When that is done, I plan to release it under an open source or Creative Commons license, for the benefit of the whole Drupal community.
Good time with Drupal friends
It has been three fantastic days with Drupal friends (both old and new ones) from all over Europe. I want to thank Kristofer van Tomme and Laura Vass of Pronovix for an fantastic event, Jan Depping and Michaela Kraft at Microsoft for the great facilities, and Ben, Dunkan, George, Jakub, Janne, Jo, Jochen, John, Karol, Michael, Pierluigi, Steve, Vesa, Wilfred and all other for great company and good conversations.