Drupal Process Event Jan 27 - 29

I was fortunate enough to be one of the 60 attendees from 40 of Europe's key Drupal companies to descend on the Microsoft offices in Amsterdam. A long but fruitful weekend was spent discussing process, project management, marketing, sales, QA, testing and much more. Heading out on Friday I was exited by the prospect of working with some of the biggest and best Drupal companies in the world and I wasn't disappointed. The level of expertise and the open sharing of lessons learned, current issues and future plans was truly wonderful. I had hoped to come back with a few improvements we could implement to continue our constant desire for quality and best practice. I came back with that and much more.

With organisations from 2 to 55 people it allowed for everyone to be able to help with support and advice on matters central to companies at different growth stages. My favorite talk was around knowledge management and knowledge sharing so it seemed apt to do a short write up noting some of our practices. Within Cameron and Wilding we use a number of methods to allow the knowledge we are building up to be shared around the organisation. These include:
Our intranet and wiki where everything from project documents and write ups of lessons learned on challenging technical issues to links to interesting articles are stored. This is very much self managed by the whole team and each individual takes the time to update anything they feel may be valuable for other team members in the future.
Every Friday we carry out a 'show and tell' session at the end of the day with the whole team. This may be anything from tricks and tips with Google mail to Apache solr search within a project we have recently worked on. Following a short presentation it then naturally moves into Q and A and open discussion.
Code reviews do not just act as a quality control method but also help the team to share and develop their skills. In addition it means we also have multiple teams members that know each individual project and can work on them when required.
Project debriefs which we carry out after completion of all major projects. These allow us to ensure we are constantly improving from project to project and creating the best possible results. And finally for any external training providers we have come in, most recently for html5 and automated training processes, we carry out write ups, post training reviews of the training quality and practice the newly learned skills as soon as possible.
During the session Jan Depping from Microsoft told us a little about their knowledge management and knowledge sharing. Their knowledge sharing system monitors tweets, email discussions and other methods of communication to record key topics, projects and people. This then allows their team to not only search a database of knowledge developed and stored for that specific purpose but to carry out searches for information that traditionally would have been trapped in silos of email, twitter and other accounts.
It is truly wonderful that the level of community support within the developer community also transfers to business. The combined skills and knowledge of the community really shone through and confirmed what we already knew - Drupal is truly great.