Unburdening Teams, Unleashing Potential: New Strategies for Digital Agency Success

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Recording. Hi there. Hello, everyone. Um, my name is George DeMet. Uh, I am the founder and co-CEO, along with Tiffany Farris of Palantir dot net. Uh, so for those of you who might not be familiar, uh, we're a digital consultancy of just under 50 people. Uh, we design and develop solutions for healthcare, higher education and, uh, public sector clients. We use Drupal, obviously, and other open source technologies. Um, so we're a fully remote company. Uh, but our roots are here in Chicago. Uh, many of our team members reside in the Chicago area. Uh, so I'm here today to talk about unburdening teams, unleashing potentials, new strategies for digital success. Um, and if you're asking yourself, um, did he have ChatGPT generate that image? Uh, the answer is yes, yes I did. Um, I'm not going to apologize for it. I'm not going to apologize for any of the other amazing images that I was up way too late, late last night having, uh, ChatGPT generate for my slides. Uh, so. Let's go ahead and get started.

I want to tell a little bit of a story. A few years ago, this was, I think it was before in the before times. Um, I attended a retreat of 30 digital agency owners. And so this was a group that that kind of provides support to digital agencies. Uh, it's kind of a community that they've created. Um, you know, they get together, they do some sessions and conferences and get togethers and retreats and things. And, uh, so at this event, over the course of I think it was three days, we were, uh, in, in near well, we were on our way to give it away. We were near, uh, we were in Northern California. We had vineyards right in this. I produced reproduction, uh, there were about 30 of us in the group. I think 28 of us were male, and we were all white. Uh, so very diverse group, um, and, you know, all kind of in our 30s to 50s, uh, running digital agencies, kind of between sort of, I think, uh, about 8 to 10 at the smallest. And I think there was one that was around 100. Um, so really kind of a same kind of size profile, you see, with a lot of companies in the Drupal ecosystem.

In fact, there were a couple of, uh, folks I knew from other Drupal agencies who were there. And, you know, we were talking about some of the challenges, right, that we had running our businesses. Right. And so I heard people talking about these things like, you know, uh, how difficult it was to find work to keep their teams billable, um, pressure to keep rates low, uh, as expenses are continuing to go up, um, team members feeling overburdened with work, uh, burning out, um, increased competition for senior level talent. Uh, not feeling like there's enough time or resources to do any kind of training or professional development because you got to keep the teams going. You got to keep them billable. Right. Uh, and, and really kind of a, you know, so many of the folks there, these owners of these companies who, you know, had built these companies up, who love these companies, uh, we're feeling really burned out. And, you know, and people were ready to sell their companies to walk away from these, uh, you know, companies, they they'd spent years and years building up.

And that was one none of that I heard was a surprise to me. Uh, you know, so I've been, uh, co-owner, co CEO of our company for the last 27 years. So I've experienced all of those challenges and more, uh, had many, many. And in these conversations were really resonate with a lot of the other kind of ad hoc conversations. I have all the time with people who run Drupal digital agencies, uh, about how difficult it is to run businesses like ours. Right. The ups and the downs. So the more of these conversations I've had over the years, the more convinced I become. There's something fundamentally broken about the digital agency model. So that's, that's that's my my first kind of bold statement, uh, of the morning. Um, so, so talking about this. Right. You know, it it feels like we are in many times a race to the bottom, right. Uh, and and when you talk with any kind of business consultants or, uh, you know, accounting accountants or folks like that, one of the biggest piece of advice you'll get is, oh, hey, you know, you need to increase your utilization, right?

Uh, that's the percentage of time that employees are spending on billable work. Right. So this bill for our time. And so it makes sense that the more of that time that is billable that you can get paid for, right, the better it is for your company. Um, so the rule of thumb is that a successful digital agency has a utilization rate of between 75 and even up to 90%, right. And the higher the better. Um, which means that there's powerful incentives for companies to fill up as much of their employees time as possible with billable work. Um, so I don't know about anyone else, but if you're spending 90% of your time on billable work, that leaves very, very little time for anything else that you might do. The course of your work, right? Uh, let alone, uh, things like professional development, growth, learning, things like that. And especially if you're a smaller company, right, and you're working with smaller clients, you know, in order to fill someone's time with that much billable work, you might have to put them on as many as half a dozen projects at a time.

Right. And if you think about it, the, the kind of the, the churn, right, that you have to deal with, the mental shifting that you have to go if you're working on six different projects at the same time, if you're if you're basically running a ticket jockey on all those projects, it is the the ability to transition is really difficult. And and that again contributes to burnout. So that's one problem. Uh, you know, another one uh, another approach is you, you replace more expensive full time employees with, with contractors. Um, and particularly if they're located outside the United States, their hourly rate is usually much lower. Uh, you don't have to worry about health insurance. You don't have to worry about benefits. Um, all of those kinds of things that add complexity and overhead. Um, but of course, unless they're fully embedded members of your team. Working with those folks is going to require more management, and that's where we kind of get to the third part of it. Right? Is that especially as your company grows, right, if you're if you're a very small company, if you're half a dozen people or less than a dozen, even, you don't really need management, right?

You don't people you're small enough that you're kind of a single team. You can figure out what to do fairly easily as you grow. There's increasing pressure to bring in managers, bring in people to help direct the work. Right. And those folks are incentivized, um, to increase productivity, to find efficiencies wherever they can. Right. Um, which means that, you know, even if they don't want to, they're going to be gravitating toward easy short term wins, right? They're not necessarily going to be thinking about long term sustainability. Right. So my point is that when all of us are doing this, it very swiftly becomes a race to the bottom. And it it compounds all of those pressures that I talked about in the previous slide. You know, another challenge when you have a hyper optimized business model, right, is that it makes companies more fragile and more vulnerable to changes in market conditions. Right now, if you were doing Drupal back in 2013 or 2014, when Drupal seven was at its stride, you are on Easy Street because there was far more work.

There were people just knocking on your door, uh, to, you know, to build sites. And it was great. And then 2015 came along and everyone knew that Drupal eight was going to be coming out at the end of the year or in a few months, and it didn't make sense to invest in a brand new Drupal seven project. Right? So a lot of people delayed their projects. They delayed them for a year or two years. Right. And the market completely dried up, uh, for those who may remember from that time. So, you know, so that was that was a decade ago and more recent years. Right. We've seen disruptions due to the pandemic. Uh, we've seen fears about inflation, uh, impacting how clients spend their money. Uh, we've seen profitable tech companies laying off people just to juice up their stock prices, uh, and countless other factors. Right. Um, so there's one agency I'm aware of that spent two years, uh, acquiring companies going on this big growth spree and, uh, only then to have to have multiple rounds of layoffs.

Right. And so they're actually the same size now or maybe even a little bit smaller than they were before they started going down this process. And if you think about that, right, there's real consequences, right? I mean, there's direct consequences for the people who lose their jobs, but there's also consequences for the organizations. Um, you have lost institutional knowledge. Um, you have pressure on those who are left behind and have to hold the bag. Um, and no matter how well planned they are, layoffs always lead to a decline in morale. They always lead to more people leaving the company. And those people who who aren't laid off and who leave, a lot of them are probably people you wanted to keep around. Right. And and it takes a tremendous amount of, of physical and emotional energy to rebuild a company after layoffs. Right. Um, I get it. I understand some cases, an opportunity you can like, you know, start with a fresh slate, rebuild better than you were before. But it's a really painful way to get there.

I have no idea what that bear is about, by the way. You're in Chicago. We are in Chicago. He's like, he's a weirdly amorphous kid. Yeah.

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Very strange bear designed by committee. Yeah. So. All right, so I've just spent a couple slides doing a lot of doom and gloom. Right. So how do we affect lasting change? Right. Where do we start? Right. How do we make our companies more sustainable, more robust? Right. Um, one of the things I hear very often, and a couple of years ago, there was a company who we were actually looking to acquire, and the the owner of this company had a lot of really kind of deep conversations with him. Uh, and. And he was in this position where he's like, look, I everything is on me, right? I don't really have like people who can support me now. He had a really great, amazing leadership team at his company. Uh, but he still didn't feel like he could be fully open with them about the challenges and the pressures and the things that kept him up at night. Right. And and, you know, and I'm talking with him and I'm like, look, it doesn't have to be this way. It can be different. And he's like, I want to believe you.

I see you're doing it differently, but I don't know how to do it right. So it's like I got to keep food on the table, right? So I appreciate that a lot because for many, many years I thought it was true. I thought that there was one way to run a business as well. And if there were problems, it was because we just didn't have the right like structure. Right? We needed to kind of like tweak some things or optimize some things. Right? So every couple of years we would, uh, get together and we'd put a bunch of sticky notes up on a board and we'd rearrange the sticky notes to see if we could find, find out, figure out that one structure that would finally support our growth at the next level. Right. So we put people in different roles. We see what worked, we'd see what didn't. And, you know, I mean, yeah, sometimes we got some great short term gains, but eventually the cracks would start showing and the cycle would start over again. The other thing that was becoming increasingly clear to Tiffany and I was that as our company was growing larger, as we put in more layers of management, right, in order to provide that scaffolding to support that growth.

Right. Um, we as the owners were becoming increasingly disconnected from the day to day of our team. Um, and we were starting to see fiefdoms emerge in the organization. Uh, we were starting to see knowledge silos start to develop. And most concerning was that that we saw that the company's, uh, values and culture were starting to shift in ways that we weren't necessarily on board with. Right.

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So. After going through. A few of these cycles and trying to trying to tweak around the edges, we realized we needed to to stop tinkering with the structure of our organization and try something completely different. But before I continue to talk about that, I need to make a little digression here and talk about the different planes of human development and how they can be applied to organizations. Take a little sip of water before I start that, uh. So this chart is adapted from um, uh, book by Frederic Laloux, uh, called Reinventing Organizations. And so he's building on, uh, previous work done by Ken Wilber and others, uh, talking about sort of different, um, different models, different mindsets, different areas of human development and applying that to organizations and organizational structure. So the trend is from models that rely on, uh, dependence to ones that rely on independence to ones that rely on interdependence. Right. So organizations that are kind of further along the scale, uh, demonstrate, are shown through research to demonstrate better results from increased team engagement as well as higher levels of trust, consciousness of their work and the impact that it has on the world around them.

Right. So okay, so on the bottom left here, right, you have um, kind of merged them together, red and amber organizations, um, those are ones that rely primarily on power and structure to motivate people. Right. So a good example of a red organization would be like the Mafia, right? Uh, power and fear to get things done. Right. You know, you don't don't cross the boss or you get whacked, right? Uh, an amber organization would be one that relies on structure, rules and compliance. So, uh, think like, uh, a public school system or the military, right, where you have very kind of rigid, defined roles and, you know, reporting, uh, hierarchies and things like that. Uh, then you have these orange organizations, these are ones that are focused on achievement and growth, right? Measurable results, ROI, uh, start ups. This is very much where most startups live. Uh, your centers are all aligned around growth and innovation. And then you have green organizations, right? These are ones that are focused on people.

They're people. They're driven by mission, purpose values. Uh, it's it's the kind of organization where everyone is part of the family. Right? Both the good and the not so good that comes with that. Right? Um, green organizations can be wonderful places to work, but they can also feel a little paternalistic. Um, and I want to be clear as I'm talking here, like, there's nothing actually wrong with any of these models as long as they're fit for purpose. Right. It's probably a really good thing that our military relies on structure and hierarchy. Um, you know, if you're looking to grow quickly and make a splash in the market, then yeah, being an orange organization is the way to go. Um, and my observation is that most of the digital agencies in the Drupal ecosystem really kind of live in this kind of orange and green place, right? Uh, they're no. And to be clear, like, no organization is like fully one color or another. It's everyone's kind of a mix. Right? Um, but what I see is that, you know, you have a lot of companies in Drupal ecosystem.

They're very a lot of them are really focused on their people. They're focused on their on their values. They're also focused a little bit on achievement as well. Right? I mean that's natural. That makes sense. So. Back to our story. Uh, so a volunteer, uh, you know, we were kind of that same way living in that that that orange green space for a really long time, and, you know, and we could have stayed there, right? We could have really kind of doubled down and becoming like, as green an organization as we could, um, you know, but as I said before, you know, even though, you know, we were officially recognized as a great place to work and all of this stuff, the company was moving in directions that we didn't feel great about, and we didn't have a great way to talk about it. Right. Our managers didn't see the same problems that we did, and they didn't want us to bring them directly to the team. God know. Right. So something needed to change. And if I'm being really honest right at this point, after doing the same thing for our entire adult lives, right at that point, we're about 20 years into the 27 years that Palantir has been in business.

We were both ready to do something a little different. So. We wanted to build an organization that was human centered, but that didn't require individuals to sacrifice themselves to the whole. We wanted to build a company that was designed to meet the needs of today, but also be able to scale to meet the needs of tomorrow. Um, we wanted to be a true learning organization where professional development is something that happens as a natural part of your work, right? Uh, is not something that gets pushed to the side when things get busy. Um. And and finally, like we wanted to be an agile company that was able to solve really interesting and complex problems and, and have a positive impact on the world, like in reality, not just as the thing we said we wanted to do in our mission statement. Right. So that led us to the last, uh, type of organization, uh, on this chart, uh, the teal organization. So in this model, uh, the company doesn't have a traditional hierarchy. Um, instead, it operates more like kind of a living organism where the different parts all work together without requiring a high degree of centralized control.

Uh, when you hear people talking about self-managing or self-organizing companies, this is what they're talking about. And we were really drawn to this because, you know, what we were starting to see is that most hierarchies because, again, you're kind of trying to reduce everything down, right? They're not well equipped to handle truly complex problems. Uh, there's, you know, again, I mentioned before a ton of research that organizations that operate in this way are stronger, they're more stable, and they have better results in higher employee satisfaction than traditional companies in their sectors. So. Starting on this journey. Trying to make this leap was a little bit scary. We didn't know if it would work, but we knew it was what we needed to do. So. Now I want to give Tiffany a lot of credit here for the principles that she came up with. Uh, as we as we embarked on this, on this redesign in earnest in 2018. Um, so we wanted to make sure, again, one, that we weren't just addressing the surface layer issues, the things that we could see, but actually taking the time to understand and address the root problems that we faced.

Um, as I said earlier, we want to design something that both worked for the needs that we had now, but were able to scale to meet our needs in the future. And finally, Tiffany is a bit of a martial arts fan. Uh, so we we adopted this Bruce Lee quote, uh, about adapting what is useful, rejecting what is useless, and adding what is specifically your own. Right. So there's a lot of self organizing models out there, right, that we could have just like picked up wholesale, you know, like holacracy. But we wanted to build something that was uniquely suited to meet the needs of our organization and its culture. So we did a lot of research. We talked with a lot of experts as we began our journey. And in fact, we're still doing research and we're still talking with experts today. Now, you know, six, six years later, um, one of the things we knew for sure. Was that we wanted to embrace agile, which, to be clear, I'm not saying that use scrum for everything. Uh, it means adopting the values that are expressed way back in that original Agile manifesto and the mindset that they come from.

Right? Valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation and responding to change over following a plan. And if you read the Agile Manifesto, they'll say it's not that those other things aren't important, it's just that we value the other things more, right? Like contract negotiation is important, right? But what's more important is that you are collaborating with your customer to actually build the product that they need, as opposed to the product that is outlined in the contract spec. Right? That's what that means. So, um, you know, so again, so the kind of three things we came up with, right? We're being just disciplined in how we work with each other, flexible in how we're able to work with our clients and optimize for focus and flow. And I'll get into that last point a little bit more. But, um, but I did want to talk about this, this graphic here that the Agile Onion, this is a graphic created by Simon Powers of Adventures with agile, which is a kind of one of the pioneering agile training and consulting companies.

So his observation, right, is that, you know, even within a command and control hierarchy, right. You can do agile, right? You can adopt the tools and practices. You can have JIRA, right? Uh, you can have your scrums, all of those things. Uh, but if you really want to unlock the entire thing, right, to really embrace those principles, values and ultimately that mindset, then you are going to have to make some structural and cultural changes to your company as you make this move toward becoming a truly learning organization. So for us, what that meant is that we would experiment as we embarked on our journey, right? We test assumptions. We iterate as we went based on real world feedback. Uh, so. Some of the things we tried early on, you know, I said we we feel it was really, really important to optimize for focus and flow. Again. You know, we had we were in a place where, again, our our managers were trying to optimize people's time and kind of slot team members in, in this kind of Jenga thing to make sure that everyone had something to be doing all the time.

Um, and folks were working on, you know, like I said, up to half a dozen projects at a time. So. Biggest thing off the board right off the bat was the shift to half and whole time resourcing. People are the resource full time on one project or half time on two projects. No one's resource to more than two projects at one time. Uh, hand in hand with that. Uh, so transition to a dedicated project team, right. So when a client works with us, they're working with a dedicated cross-functional team. Uh, the composition of that team may evolve over time depending on the needs of the project. Right. Uh, but the idea is that there's this little churn as possible and that you have as many of the people who are involved at every single stage of the project. Right. You don't, you know, the designer and the engineers, they work together from the beginning of the project. You don't have the, you know, the kind of throw it over the fence handoff that you see in a lot of companies. Um, but of course, then, right to support this.

Right. Um, you also need to have clarity of roles, uh, charters, working agreements. Uh, so when again, you know, we start a project, uh, you know, there are there are people on that team who are working on that project. They get together and they decide, okay, who's going to be, you know, the product owner, who's going to be the lead engineer, the architect, the designer. Right. And most of the time it's like kind of pretty clear because it's like, you know what they do. Uh, but, uh, you know, but really getting that down and saying, okay, here's the roles in the project. Here's here's how we're going to do this, here's how we're going to work with each other. Right. Uh, if somebody's in the middle of a project needs to take a vacation, how is that going to get communicated? How is that? How does the team the team comes up with that agreement for how that work works? Right. There's not like a policy that says, oh, you've got to submit it to HR, you know, so many weeks in advance and everything.

But the policy says is you make the arrangement with your project team and then you let the company know, hey, you know, I'm going to be taking this two week vacation or going on sabbatical, or I'm getting married and going to be on my honeymoon. And the team has figured out, uh, how to navigate that and how to make sure that that person's responsibilities are covered during that time. There's no surprises. Um, so. The again, the other thing we needed to make sure to support that right was instead of chasing every single interesting opportunity that came our way, right, we would instead focus on winning larger multi year engagements where we could bring meaningful value to our clients. Right. We had already begun this process kind of moving away from, you know, these kind of smaller sized projects, you know, six months less than a year to, uh, working with clients who could support, uh, the kind of larger multi year engagements. It turns out that the fact that we specialize in Drupal was really good for that because, um, it's used by a lot of the kind of larger public and institutional clients that have these kinds of projects and that we wanted to work with anyway.

So this phrase nothing about us without us. This is a phrase that's been actually around for many hundreds of years. Um. But I think it's sort of best known in recent decades as coming out of the disability community. And the idea really is that instead of a. Telling us what to do or how to do it. We need to be involved in those decisions that impact us as people, right? And so we, um, there's a lot of tools for that which is which is useful. So, uh, you know, we we introduced and started adopting the core protocols, which is kind of a very lightweight, uh, tool set of set of practices for, you know, just kind of checking in with each other for making quick decisions, things like that, liberating structures, which again, provide, uh, a really a set of participatory tools for groups of people who are looking to do different things, whether it is making sense of the situation or making a decision or something like that. Um, and then, you know, other tools as well that really just are focused around supporting that engagement and participation from everyone on the team.

Right? Not just those people who have, you know, the most seniority or the loudest voice. And then we developed this model, um, the decision tree. So the decision tree is kind of an idea that exists, right? Um, about, um, how you kind of assess the impact of a decision and consequently, who should be responsible for it. Right? So the tree you've got your your leaf decisions, right. A leaf decision is like a simple decision you can make on your own. You don't need to involve anyone else in that decision. Uh, you know, like, I need a buy a new dongle for my laptop. Right. Like, that's a classic example. Uh, you have your your branch decisions. So the branch decision is probably one that, uh, in our case, would, would impact people on a project team. Right. And so that's a decision, uh, maybe sort of, you know, what kind of tool are we going to use on this job? What sort of UX research methodology are we going to use? Again, that's a decision, right, that that the team is involved in making.

But it's not something that I need to weigh in on. If I'm not part of that team, the team is fully equipped to make that decision themselves. You get into the the trunk level decisions. Those are decisions that impact multiple teams. Uh, so that might be a decision like, uh oh. What's a good one? Uh. Whether we use confluence to store our, uh, project information, right? Or client information. Right. Like that's something that's going to impact multiple teams because it impacts how teams, uh, share knowledge and information with everyone. And so in that decision, you're going to want to have people from multiple teams getting together to make that decision. And then you've got the route decisions, right. These are the decisions that have an entire company wide impact. Right? So if you, uh, you know, you want to be really careful with these decisions because if you, you know, destroy the roots of the tree, the whole thing is going to die. Right? And so that is where, you know, kind of policy level decisions are that impact our company's financial model will go.

And those are ones where you not only want the people from the different teams, people from the trunk involved, but you you know, this is this is where Tiffany and I are part of the decision making process. Um, so that's a decision tree. And we've kind of elaborated that. We've got a big Miro board that really talks about how it works in the context of our organization. Uh, another thing that we've done, uh, and do is provide quarterly weather reports that provide transparency into the financial state of the company. Uh, we've been doing those for a few years now. Uh, and, you know, we're really clear, like, yeah, here's here's how much we're making here's what our, you know, profit margin is, here's what our cache reserves look like, all of that. And, you know, and when there is a change, it's like, here's why that's happening. Here's what we're seeing. Right. One of the things we're starting to do now is introduce those at the project level. So project level teams will have transparency into how their project is doing and how they're, um, you know, doing at a financial level.

And then, you know, we're working on introducing that in a way that doesn't, like, scare the bejesus out of them, but gives them the context that they need to understand. It's like, okay, maybe our team is too big. You know, maybe we have too many senior level people on our team, and we need to supplement with some junior level folks because otherwise we're billing too high. Right? Again, involving the team in that decision that impacts them. Uh, and then, you know, one of the things that we did last year was beautiful. We had a retreat, our first in person retreat in four years last summer. And, um, I mean, we had I think half of our team had never met in person at that point. And, uh, in the past, we would have had this thing where we would have had committee responsible for organizing the retreat and getting the content together and finding the speakers and doing all that stuff. Instead, we use a technique called open space technology. Some of you might be familiar with it. Um, you know, it comes with a lot of unconferences use it.

And so we used that, uh, for our retreat. We had amazing facilitator working with us. Uh, Lisa Atkins, who is well known in the agile coaching community and is, uh, also been working with us through greater Than Collective. And, uh, and it was great. We had conversations about things that that retreat that I would have never thought in a million years we would be talking about openly as a company. Uh, and, and so again, that is, that is people, you know, bringing, bringing their own, uh, knowledge, their experience, their expertise and getting people together to talk about it. All right. I'm keep an eye on time here because I want to have a little bit of time. I suspect there might be some Q&A. I'm hoping there's some Q&A. Another thing we did is we focused on was self-directed career growth and development. Right. So, um, we don't have managers at Palantir. Uh, so so you're like, well, so how do you like, evaluate team members? How do you decide who gets a promotion? Um, you know, how how does how does someone how is someone's career growth managed developed.

Right. So we have, um, what we call pod team. That's professional organizational development team. Uh, that's made up of two other people that they work with, uh, to provide peer coaching to help them identify their performance, growth and professional development goals. The way this works is that, um, you know, and I've got a pod myself. Right. So I will have, uh, you know, a one on one, uh, meeting with, you know, the, the, my pod representatives, uh, you know, every, every few weeks. And then we'll all three of us will get together at least once a quarter, and, you know, we'll we'll talk about, um, you know. How the last quarter is then what we've been working on, what I'm interested in working on in the next quarter. Right. And and how I'm going to get there. And I have these other peer coaches who are able to in a very like, psychologically safe way, help me identify that and help me identify those goals, help me identify how I'm going to get there. Right. The other thing we did is we introduced leveled salaries, right?

To provide equal pay for equal responsibilities, regardless of tenure or past experience. Right. And so, um, and I'll talk a little bit about how we kind of determine where folks are on that level. But essentially the idea is that you work at the level of responsibility that you're comfortable with that you want to be working in. And if you stay at that level, it's okay because we build in a salary increase every year, so you're not getting left behind, and you don't have to seek a promotion and take on more responsibility. If you're happy being, you know, someone who's a front end developer at a particular level and you want to be at that level for 8 or 9 years, it's okay, you're going to do fine. You're going to continue to have your salary increase every year. You don't have to get a promotion to do it. And um, so then the question is, okay, well, maybe I do want to take on more. Maybe I do want a promotion. Right. Uh, so how do I know how to do that? How do I know what level I'm I'm I'm at.

How do I know what level, how to get to the next level. So we have this rule based structure. Um, it's actually available online. I should have provided a link to it. Uh, but it identifies demonstrated behaviors that are, uh, expected sort of at each level. Right. And so those are because we prioritize kind of T-shaped skills. So we have, uh, skills that are specific to the discipline that you're in. Right. So if you are a front end developer, these are kinds of things that we expect you to be doing at each level in that part of the T. And then we also have what we call these systems and consulting skills. And those are universal for every role. And those are really focused around things like how you work with other people, um, how you provide mentorship, whether you participate in sales and business, how well you understand complexity. Right. So we have, uh, each of those and each of those, all of those individual things are then, uh, on a, on a scale of 1 to 5, and then there's a formula that basically you plug in and it tells you sort of what level you're at.

Right? And if you're not at the level you think you should be right, or you're like, I think I can do more, right? Well, then the promotion process again is one that's self-directed, and the way it works is that you get together with the other members of your pod who also participate in the scoring process, uh, along with yourself. And you put together a packet that basically talks about what you've been doing, how you've been doing it, um, a personal reflection on your growth. And you submit that we have a committee that reviews it. Uh, if there's questions or concerns or we think someone's just completely off base, we we will bounce it back. Uh, but, uh, otherwise if it's if it if it makes sense, we're like, yep. Absolutely. Then, um, then you are in line for a promotion. You get your promotion at basically at the next quarterly gate. And, uh, one of the things I didn't put in here was really like, we do a celebration with the whole company, and it's an opportunity where the person gets to kind of talk about their growth and where their pod members get to talk about the growth that they've observed and other people who they work with get that opportunity as well.

So it's a really cool, special, uh, uh, kind of event for everyone. Um, the other thing the pod helps out with is identifying, uh, professional development opportunities at both the individual and team level. Right. So, um, you know, again, that is I want to learn, you know, how to do react. I need some professional development around that, or I want to take this agile coaching course. And then but then also at the team level, we have professional development opportunities that teams can sign up for around things like some of the ones. We're doing right now around things like, uh, uh, how how to work with challenging clients might be one. And those are things that, you know, we do that training for groups of teams that sign up for that. So it works at both levels. Um, so journey so far starting to wrap up here. Um, since we started this, we've seen increased engagement around all levels of the organization. I want to be clear, that includes me. Okay. Before we started this, I think I talked about how I was feeling a little disconnected, uh, from what we were doing and kind of where we were going.

And, but as we've gone through this process and as everyone has had more opportunity to engage with each other, I feel more connected with what we're doing than I ever have before. Um, I had like three conversations with three different people over the last two days about a problem that one of our project teams was experiencing, and we were all coming at it from different perspectives, different lenses. But we were all seeing the problem. Right. And. Because we've been able to do that, because we've been able to actually talk about that. Um, then that means that it's going to be easier to address that problem because we all see it, we know it's there, and we're talking about it. Right? Um, so it's not like everything is sunshine and roses all the time. We still have problems. We still have challenges. Uh, we still people still get in conflict with each other. This is kind of how humans work. Um, but we're able to to surface those issues, we're able to talk about them, and we're able to address them in a more open and transparent and positive way than letting them fester until somebody blows up and, you know, and people end up getting fired.

Right. Um, something I'm very proud of, uh, we've increased the overall diversity of our team. Uh, and, you know, part of that is the way we've approached the hiring process. Uh, but but I think it is also we're seeing people referring other folks to join our team who understand that it is a place that is supportive of people with all kinds of different backgrounds, experiences and needs. Um, we've learned how to develop junior talent. This is a big deal in Drupal guys like it is. There's a lot of competition for senior level developers, but there's relatively little attention paid to kind of growing junior level talent. So we have this really great, uh, program where we identify folks, we put them through, uh, Mike Angelo's, uh, Drupal career online course. Uh, we start them out with a paid internship, and then we bring them on as junior developers. And, uh, some of those folks are pretty amazing, I'll tell you. So that's a really, like anyone in Drupal. Like, figuring out how to do that, how to grow talent instead of just acquire it is huge.

Uh, we're working on big, impactful projects positively impact people's lives. Like, for real, uh, which is amazing. Um, and, you know, I mean, I'd be remiss if I didn't say we're also have some of the highest revenues. We have the highest revenues and cache reserves in our 27 year history as an organization. Right. And we're only just getting started. We're well, I showed that graph before. Like we are not in the teal yet. Okay. We are getting there. We're in kind of that liminal space in between. There's still some green. There's still some orange in our company. But the overall journey, um, is one that's, you know, progressing, I think, pretty well. So. All right, what does your organization need to do this, um, sense of curiosity, an abundance mindset. We can do this. Not I don't know how we can do this, or we don't have time to do this, or we don't have enough money to do this. We can figure out how to do this. Um, a willingness to let go old ways, even if they've served you well in the past.

And this is probably been, as we've gone through this journey, uh, been the place where we've had the most tension, people who are really attached to, uh, particular roles that are no longer necessary or particular ways of doing things because they're like, well, that worked well. And it's like, yes, for the old dos, but this is the new us. And so being willing to let go old ways to, to, to make that transition, for example, from being a manager to being a coach, um, that can be hard. But if you can make that transition, if you have that flexible mindset, um, that's that's key leadership team that's fully on board. If you're if even one person on your leadership team is not convinced of this, is probably not going to work. Um, again, I talked about the organization that we we almost acquired a couple of years ago. Um, they had a great leadership team that was largely, but not completely on board with becoming part of our organization and adopting our ways of working. And that's why it didn't happen.

Right? Um, because I knew we knew all of us knew that if they weren't fully committed to this, um, they were we were going to have resistance. We were going to have folks trying to undermine it every step of the way. So, yeah, be on board.

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Have faith in your team. Um, my experience is that most people are really looking for these opportunities to try new things, to be asked, to help. Instead of told what to do. And that again, like you may not see it now, I have been pleasantly surprised so many times by just how different folks in our team have have risen. Uh, to meet the new challenges, to try new things. Um, really good outside perspectives. So we work. We've worked with many different consultants and folks as we've gone through this process, the folks we're working with right now and have been for the last couple of years, a company called Greater Than, uh, and they're kind of an international group of practitioners and coaches and experts, uh, in thought partners in different kinds of self-organizing and progressive ways of working. And, um, they've been really, really invaluable to have along the road, uh, as we've gone through this. So. That's my presentation. Thank you. Uh, you got feedback? There's feedback link there.

Here's where you can find me on the socials. Any questions? Comments, observations. Oh, hello. Yes. Go ahead.

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Um, so when you, uh, mentioned, you know, we don't have managers. Are you referring to, like, we don't have people whose sole job is to manage other people, but you do have senior leadership roles, right? And so when you so when you form your, your your pods in your groups, like you said, you're including yourself. Yeah. So do you put yourself in with like the senior leadership group or how do how do you divide up the role? Um, so we kind of let people divide themselves. Um, you know, and when I say so, we have people in when you talk about leadership roles, you know, I think we're very leader for organization. We have people in roles that provide, um, operational support. Um, that's that's something I do a lot of, uh, we have a chief of staff, uh, you know, we have a, you know, someone who works with our, our team members to make sure that, you know, um, benefits and HR and all of those sorts of things. Um, none of us are directing what any person. Does on a project team. Um, we may be responsible for saying, okay, establishing sort of where certain guardrails might exist in the organization, like, oh, hey, um, and being clear about those, like, okay, here's here's something that if we do it will have a negative impact on the company.

So we don't do that. Right. And here's why. Um, so so for the senior folks, it's been a really interesting situation for the folks, the senior level folks on our team who do work on projects. Right. Um, they are very often seen as mentors. They are, but they're actively involved in the project work. And, you know, I was talking with someone the other day who's like, I'm really frustrated because I have this other person, um, you know, who's who's junior to him on on the team who, who doesn't see eye to eye with with how I think we should do this. Right. And so that's actually kind of his communication challenge to help that other person understand, like, oh, hey, I think we should do it this way because I come in with this experience. And my experience is if we do it the way you want to do it, we're going to encounter these problems, right? And to figure out how to have that conversation in a respectful way. And, you know, and then, I mean, the team may still decide to do it that way.

Um, he doesn't get a veto, but he is part of the conversation. And again, his his experience weighs into that conversation. That kind of answer your question. Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a longer conversation. It is. And then. Yeah. So the question that I have is first I want to say I believe that like team members are absolutely the most valuable thing that a company can have. And keeping them happy and productive and inspired and with high morale is absolutely there. What I'd like to hear are some perhaps comparisons of what you what you used to be with staff to what is now. What I'm looking for is to hear, like maybe a story about how to connect the actions that you've taken, that you've talked about here, and how that has led to you having like, so much money in the bank and having a great deal of success? Um, because, yeah, you know, I just I want to have a stronger, like, causal relationship. So, so, so I think that the, the very direct causal relationship is that it feels like when it comes to project work, um, our team members now have feel like they have the space and they to be able to get into that state of focus and flow and be able to, um, instead of just like, oh, hey, here's a ticket in front of me, here's the user story.

I'm going to bang this thing out. Right? And I may have done, you know, written some code that satisfies the requirements of the user story, but there's not an awareness of how that user story fits into the larger project that they're working on. Right. Because this might be one of, you know, 4 or 5, six projects that they're working on at any one time when you have a team that's able to get together and be dedicated and focused on. On on a single project, on a single set of client needs. You can actually really take a look at that at a much deeper level. At a, at a how are we delivering value for our client question as opposed to how are we, you know, how are how how are we meeting, how are how am I fulfilling the user stories? How am I how am I banging out these tickets? Right. Like, that's that's I think it's not a very like specific story but but but it is that but it is how we are now better equipped to really focus on delivering value, how to how to deliver outcomes rather than outputs.

Excellent. Thank you. Yeah. In your cross-functional teams, how do you handle support and how do you handle sales? Yes. So, um, we have a team that is the support team. Uh, and actually it's our it's our we call it our Drupal. Um, uh, it's it's the, the CDP team. So it's, it's our it's our, uh, continuous delivery portfolio team. Right. So they provide support services, but they also are providing ongoing they're strategic partners to our clients. They're providing ongoing strategic services. And so, um, so that teams portfolio is treated as a single project. And they've done some really clever things within that team to make sure that they're not jumping back and forth between different clients in that portfolio all the time, that they're able to focus on one client at a time, that they're able to be really careful and strategic about how they engage with those clients. And so, yeah, so we have, you know, we might have project A team, project B team, project C team, and then we have the continuous delivery portfolio team who is handling the needs of uh, of of those clients who were not, you know, building things for uh, actively at the time.

Now, actually, that team can actually handle build projects as well. So that sometimes happens, um, sales. So that is uh, so, so we have a dedicated group of folks who are in that, um, that, uh, really what we call it, it's, it's that new business client engagement role. Right. And so, uh, there that so there's, that's in there working directly with individual project teams. We also have on each team there's a role called the Scout. The role of the scout is to figure out what's the next thing my team is going to be working on after the project I'm on is done. Right. And so they will work with, um, you know, with the folks in that, in that new business team to say, okay, you know, we've got this RFP that's come across, this will be a project to be a great fit for your team. And, you know, and it will start in three months, which is about when you're going to be wrapping on your current project. Right. So they will help out with preparation. That proposal and the development of a solution, participate in the pitches, things like that, which is actually really great because the clients actually get to meet the people who will actually be working on their projects, um, before they've even engaged with us, which they really like.

Yeah. All right. Are you going to be here for the end conference this afternoon? Um, I, I'm going to have to leave shortly after lunch. Sorry. Yeah. So I think I take one more question. I see there's a huge group of people outside and I want to let them in. So, yeah, I was. Wondering about level salaries. Yes. Do you, do you add another level? If there is a team member that kind of starts to go too ambitious and kind of how do you keep adding levels or do you have them and potentially lose them as they transition to another company or another road just because they feel like they are providing more value? So, um, we haven't had to do that yet because our, our levels come on in. I'm on my last question. Uh, so, uh, so the levels that we have, um, are built to really kind of encompass the entire range of salaries that would be offered at any company like ours. Uh, and so, uh, you know, we do have a handful of people who are toward that, that higher end, um, and, you know, but I don't currently at this point, see.

At least out of the shorter mid-term future. A need to add levels beyond that, because again, we're really kind of, uh, we are accounting for the different amount, the levels of response. I mean, at that high level of responsibility, I mean, you're basically the CEO, right? Um, and so I think if we had to make a shift, it might be not in terms of how the levels are defined, but maybe how those salary grid aligns to those different levels. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. We got we got a let the session in here. But thank you all very much. And thank you so much. Thank you for your patience. Even even though George.

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Can't make it this afternoon.