In order to successfully create a great digital experience with Drupal, you need a great Drupal team. Building a great team requires some thoughtful planning and possibly widening your net a bit. In this blog series, we'll be looking at the 5 Steps to Build a Great Drupal Team.
- Step 1: Understand typical teams, roles and job titles
- Step 2: Define your requirements
- Step 3: Widen your net with your job description
- Step 4: Where and how to post jobs
- Step 5: Evaluating applicants
With the rapid growth and change of the web, and the constant change of roles and job definitions, employers in the field of web development find they’re competing to attract the brightest talents. It’s definitely a job seeker’s market. It wouldn’t be overstating the fact to say that hiring in all fields of technology is a major challenge. In that sense, the Drupal community is no different.
Step 1: Understanding typical teams, roles and skills
In Step 1, we’re going to talk about team composition, roles and job titles along with the skills you should be expecting to encounter in a Drupal project.
- Typical implementation teams
- Explaining Drupal Roles
- Matching skill levels to requirements
If you’re an experienced digital agency but adopting Drupal for the first time, or you are bringing Drupal development in-house for the first time, or if you're looking to leave freelancing behind and run your own Drupal company, then you’re probably hiring and growing your first Drupal team.
The positions you need to fill will depend on your existing team members’ skills and the limitations of the training needs you can meet. The roles in a particular team depend on a number of factors:
- The size of the company or size of projects
- Are you client facing or working on internal projects?
- Your company’s niche focus
Typical implementation teams
The varying features and functionality of Drupal projects dictate team composition and size. The difference between small and large teams is more than a matter of numbers. To understand what type of team you need, it helps to understand the composition of each.
Small Teams: Where everybody knows your name
Small teams are appropriate for straightforward development projects involving a single site, limited custom development, and little or no systems integration. On a small team, every member of the team is aware of all aspects of the project, and roles might be blurred. Communication and coordination is relatively easy as a result.
Angelo Vanmarcke, lead developer at MAISTER creative service unit is responsible for all aspects of implementation. The internal team collaborate on the visual design, flow charts and planning. In their case, the project manager is also a junior developer who can also do some site development, translation, pixel-perfect theming and client training. Overall it's the job of their project manager to consult with the client bringing designs and plans back and forth from client to internal team. “Sometimes, when things go wrong, I personally communicate with the client”, Angelo says.
A small implementation team consists of two to five people. The roles on a small team may include:
- Technical Lead (required)
- Project Manager (required)
- Junior Developer
- Themer
- Quality Assurance Specialist
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Large Teams: Scaling to meet complexity
Project teams grow in size to accommodate more complex projects. Large teams are equipped to handle complex custom development projects involving one or more codebases.
“Roles become more crystallized on larger teams”, says Balázs Dianiska, Technical Consultant at Acquia. “As teams grow in size, communications can break down. In order to scale, you need to clearly define responsibilities and tasks.”
Large teams often have more than one person filling a role and a hierarchy of responsibility. Roles on a large team may include:
Project Management Team
- Engagement Manager
- Project Manager
- Quality Assurance Specialist
Technical Team
- Technical Architect
- Technical Lead
- Senior Developer/Developer
- Junior Developer
- Themer
