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We are excited to announce that registration and session proposals are now open for Stanford Drupal Camp 2016!

Register now for the seventh Annual Stanford Drupal Camp April 1-2, 2016 at the Stanford Law School.

https://drupalcamp.stanford.edu/user/register

Drupal Camp is a great opportunity for the Stanford Drupal community to come together and share new approaches, best practices for the web, and love of Drupal. The schedule includes great sessions for those new to the web and Drupal all the way to advanced users and plenty of opportunities to network with colleagues.

We will have tracks for web content strategy, user experience and design, operations and development (DevOps), and building sites for research and academia.

As always, it’s free!

Once you've registered, you are invited to propose a session. In the right sidebar, click on Propose a Session!

If you have any questions, please contact [email protected]

Happy Drupalling, and look forward to seeing you in April!

Stanford Web Services serves a diverse set of clients throughout Stanford University, ranging as large as schools to as small as individual labs. With over 200 active or completed website projects, and an average of 18 new project inquiries per month, we needed to implement a Customer Relationship Management system to track all of our operational data and communications.

Which CRM?

Last year we evaluated 7 different CRMs, including: Insightly, SalesForce, Zoho, Sugar CRM, HubSpot, RedHen, and Podio. After analyzing each of the options through an evaluation matrix based on our needs, we settled on Podio for our team. It has now been over 7 months since we’ve migrated all of our data from disparate systems into Podio, and the reception has been very positive across all roles in the team. We were able to consolidate various types of information from Basecamp, Google Docs/Sheets, Excel files, email, mailing lists, and even information that only existed in our staff’s memory.

Importing and Setting Up Your Data

One of the critical requirements for adding a CRM to our operations was its ease of data import and export. Podio, at its core, can be thought of as a UI on top of a relational database, so we found it extremely flexible and customizable for our needs. It’s quick and simple to import and export data in Excel format. We set up several “apps” for each of our types of data: an “app” is similar to that of a Content Type in Drupal, though simplified. We have apps for our leads, organizations, projects (completed and in progress), website launches calendar, help tickets, products (we have several product offerings, including the Jumpstart product line), potential deals (new inquiries), website theme information, vendor contacts, and more.

Connectivity and API

Using Podio’s “Email API”, we were able to easily integrate a number of other systems to feed data into Podio. Although Podio has built-in support for webforms, we use Qualtrics to create web forms with question display logic and email triggers to customize the data that gets fed into Podio (such as for help tickets or new project inquiries). We’ve also used ZenDesk’s triggers to pass help ticket information from one of our partners to Podio.

By having all of our operational data in one system, we were able to improve our operations across the board, from the intake level all the way through to the support level. We can take a look at an organization’s listing and easily see all of our active and completed projects with them, their related help tickets, a list of new project inquiries from them, as well as the potential value of those new projects.

The inbox is not where you store communications

Another one of the primary goals for implementing a CRM was to record communications more visibly and permanently as opposed to in an individual’s email or via a mailing list. Within each of these items in Podio, such as a single project, or a single help ticket, Podio allows users to add comments and attachments via an “activity stream”. This feature essentially improves coordination and communication within the team: such as if someone needs to take over a deal consultation from another team member and wants to read all the past communications with that client. To do this, our team member would simply CC or BCC the “Email To Item” email address provided by Podio for that specific item. This process also ensures information retention for the team. Changes to fields within an item are also tracked in the activity stream, allowing us to see who made the change and when.

A single point of reference

Podio serves as first point of reference for information: from there, we can link out to a project’s relevant Harvest listing, JIRA project, Basecamp listing (if applicable), as well as links to a project’s development and production site URLs. Since implementing it with our operations, it has saved countless hours of searching and coordination, as well as improved communications and information awareness within our team.

Have you looked into CRMs for your team, or do you use one already? How has your experience been? What are your favorite features from your CRM?

2015 has been amazing! Big thanks to all of our wonderful and devoted colleagues around the university and in the community. We wish you happy holidays over the winter break, and we'll see you in 2016!

Even though it feels like I have known the SWS team for years, the truth is that I have only been here for two months. The reason it feels that way might be because of the amount of things I’ve learned from my colleagues over the past 8 weeks could be compared to an intense 4-year combined degree in Computer Science/Customer Relations/Project Management. Another reason could be that the amazing people that comprise this team make you feel at home right away.

Why is SWS so good at what they do?

Something that became clear to me after just a couple of days working here was that the SWS team doesn't just call themselves a team, they area team. When someone has a lot on their plate while others don’t, they simply help each other out. This might sound banal, but far too often people within an organization do their own thing and don't bother about helping their coworkers because “it’s not their job." The reason why SWS manages to function as a team is because everyone on the team is highly flexible: the developers help out producers with their tasks; the producers help out developers with some of their tasks; the PMs jumps in wherever they’re needed. This allows for a high-productivity team that wouldn’t be able to function as it does now if part of the team just stood by the sideline and observed the bottlenecks that slowly brings down the overall productivity.

The power of communication

Communication is the key to everything in organizations such as SWS. Without good communication the team would hit multiple brick walls everyday, but SWS rarely (never as far as I know) does. Every morning at 9.30 am the team gathers in the collaboration space for a SCRUM meeting where everyone briefs the others what is on their agenda for the day. This is a perfect opportunity for people who are blocked from doing something to bring this up to the team’s attention, and by doing so opens up the possibility to get help from someone who knows how to tackle the issue at hand.

Every Friday the team has what is called "Morning of Awesome" (Mo'A), where they sit together in the collaboration space for two hours. During MoA the team could break into small groups and work on a project together, or everyone just sits together and works on their own things and asks the rest of the team for help if needed. One particularly valuable thing with these mornings is how it strengthens the team to work together as an organism, and not as separate entities. This is especially important for teams that have many different roles but also a product that depends on how these different parts come together. 

The willingness to help others

Instead of having someone on the team taking over the tasks that you can’t do, wouldn’t it be better practice to transfer the knowledge on how to solve the problem at hand? This is something that SWS does extremely well: they block a time to go over the issue at hand, solve it together and BAAM: next time the same issue comes up you have two people that know how to deal with it. If you instead frame these issues to only let one person to deal with them, you're depending too much on having this person available all the time. 

This willingness to help others extends far beyond the boundaries of the team - they contribute to the Stanford community by writing this blog, providing a user guide and also by attending conferences where they share their experience and knowledge with other Universities. 

The importance of having fun

In addition to being a high-performing, professional team with lots of flexibility; SWS also knows the importance of having fun. There’s a fine line between ‘having fun’ and ‘just goofing around’ in the workplace, and this is where the excellent management comes into the picture. Having management that is aware of this fine line and knows how to keep the team's eye on the prize while having fun - without wasting precious time - is to me astonishing and what I believe to be one of the key components to this extremely attractive workplace.

Last words

I am extremely grateful that I had the opportunity to work with these amazing people. Even though I’ve only been here for 8 weeks I’m confident when I say that every single one of the people on the team has taught me something that I will bring with me 5,379.96 miles over the Atlantic Ocean when I go back to Sweden.