Echidna, a Creator or a Configurator?

Last month, Resolution - another awesome web firm in town - posted a blog titled "Creator or Configurator". Full post here

The premise of the post is that they are concerned that many in the industry are becoming configurators rather than creators - and that "lack of innovation kills value". I can't argue with that point. This really got me thinking... are we at Echidna, a creator or a configurator?

When I first started Echidna I wanted to create everything from scratch. Being a developer, creating meant coding to me. I enjoyed the creative challenge of writing new code in different ways for each client. As my team grew I found that I kept evolving my code base and leaving my teammates behind. I just wasn't good at sharing my knowledge with my team - not to mention changing my methods too frequently. If we wanted to grow and mature as a web development shop, we needed to standardize and work together.

About two years ago, we selected a development framework called Drupal to be the basis of the majority of our projects. The framework was chosen because of the types of projects we build for our clients and based on the knowledge set of our team. There were some growing pains (and there still are) as Drupal evolves and we get deeper and deeper in our understanding. Today we use Drupal for about 80% of our projects - because Drupal is such a powerful framework with a large community of developers improving it daily, we find that we don't have to create as much code for projects as we did in the past. So in a sense when it comes to our code base we have become more configurators of Drupal than creators. There are still many opportunities to extend Drupal and create new modules but for the majority of our clients we are configuring our own drupal distribution to their needs. Since I agree that "lack of innovation kills value", if we were to rest on our laurels and stopped developing our Drupal knowledge and extending our distribution - we would be robbing our clients of value. I feel that I've addressed this by allocating 15% of each developer's week to R&D.

Getting back to creating...

Now that we find ourselves able to implement functionality in to our solutions quicker and quicker - I find this leaves us more time in a budget to do what we actually love - create. At Echidna we don't generally create marketing messages and brands for our clients like many of our competitors - we work with organizations that know what they want to say and have a strong existing brand identity. So when we talk about creating we are generally talking about our idea generation phase and discovery process that eventually leads us to an interface design. This process is filled with questions for clients in a effort to understand what they are trying to accomplish and ends with us creating recommendations for various levels of solutions. It also focuses largely around creating a plan for the client on how they will use the site moving forward and the concept of content strategy and management. Once that is in place we turn to the creation of the design interface - this is generally everyone's favourite part but is influenced by so many factors within each client's organization that it can be challenging.

So all in all, I believe we are doing a lot of creating in our preparation and planning of a project and more configuring when it comes to implementation. I think this fundamental change to our process is largely reflected in the makeup of our team. We are weighted evenly between client services and developers, and even then the lines between those roles are becoming more and more blurred each day. Client service members can now use Drupal to configure websites and build functionality while traditional developers spend less time coding and more time researching new functionality and enlightening clients with new ideas. All in all, I'm pretty happy with our configurator/creator model which I know is serving our clients well.

So, my conclusion is that as a service provider we are definitely part configurator and part creator... and in the end our client's and the market will let us know which they value more. Thanks again to Resolution for a very cool post that really got me thinking!