We want to get you better acquainted with the kind of company Agiledrop is, the practices we employ and the team spirit we cultivate. So, we’ve decided to start a series of blog posts that tell the story of how the company has managed to make a name for itself and form a team that major global agencies can trust and depend upon. 

In the first post of the series, we got you familiar with our workflow and the advantages it has brought for our team as well as for our clients. But defining the workflow of your business is not all sunshine and rainbows, especially if your goal is to be on the cutting edge in your field.

So, as promised in the first chapter, the second post of the series will take a look at the major challenges we faced when defining a workflow as unique as ours. We’ll discuss one of them in detail and present our very efficient solution to it.

 

Challenges

The management of a team fragmented over different projects and agencies alongside the rapid growth of the company turned out to be quite challenging. We’ve had to:

• Establish effective training programs to deal with people’s personal and professional development,
• Find a way to monitor and control the work of developers integrated into different agencies and managed directly by the clients and their teams,
• Promote an environment where everybody is encouraged to share their knowledge with each other to limit the skill gaps,
• Create a system that motivates employees and maintains a strong company culture.

 

Effective Training Program

The first thing we had to do was establish a process for training new employees to meet requirements needed to work as independent members of the client’s team.

All freshly recruited developers are first given an initial onboarding project which involves tasks and environments that they will need later on in their work. This helps them get familiar with the practices and modules they will be using when working on actual projects with clients.

Understanding the importance of training has led us to take our best people from their projects and assign them to take over education and knowledge-sharing among new and existing developers. These dedicated mentors are available to new members of the team throughout their onboarding, offering them support and validating their tasks.

Even with such a well organized system, the training of new employees lasted from 3 to 6 months or more; but, in order to provide our customers with experienced Drupal developers, we had to find suitable long-term projects where they could improve their knowledge and skills to the level where we were confident they would meet all the expectations of our clients.

Besides onboarding new team members, the process of improving the knowledge of existing developers is constantly in progress and Agiledrop's investment in education is quite substantial. This helps us maintain the high standards we have set and it has proved to be crucial to maintaining a strong company culture based on personal growth and professional development.

One of the most prominent advantages of our investment in training and education is maintaining top-notch results despite the number of developers increasing rapidly. This has a double positive effect: the clients are satisfied and the developers are able to take pride in their work.

 

Conclusion

Of course, this was not the only challenge we had to deal with, as pointed out earlier. The next post of this series will talk about ensuring the long-term satisfaction of our clients by continuously involving ourselves in the projects and helping with their maintenance even after their launch. 

 

Check back early next year for chapter 3 of Agiledrop’s story!
 

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Other posts in this series:

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 3: Cultivating Strong Relationships with Clients
• Chapter 4: A Company Culture That Benefits Both Employees and Clients