client management

Most of the Affinity Bridge team will be heading south to this year's PNW Drupal Summit (which rotates between Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland, and is in Portland this year). There will be two official sessions that our team members will be presenting that you might want to check out if you're coming to the conference:

Best practices for running a Drupal-based business (Panel)

10:10am - Saturday, October 15, 2011

Mack is going to be part of a business panel that will be addressing various questions and ideas related to running a Drupal based company. Topics they'll be discussing include: how to find good clients, how to find and keep a good team, pricing, and best practices. More details on the session page.

Using Build Kit & the Kit specification to build Drupal distributions

2:30pm - Sunday, October 16, 2011

When we started transitioning into using an Agile development method just over a year ago, one of the first and most constant challenges we ran into was how to make it work for our clients. Agile has been a fantastic tool for defining internal processes that really work for us at Affinity Bridge. Many of our clients, being non-profit organizations and academic institutions, however, are accountable to boards who have to review and approve their budgets ahead of time. They're not able to bill according to work done during agile sprints, without having budgeted for the work ahead of time. Here are a few tips from the lessons we've learned for doing agile development while managing estimates and budgets in a way that works for our clients.