Cross Training Pays Off
As an Account Manager at LevelTen, my primary responsibility is to bring in new accounts and help grow existing accounts. Whether it be attending specialized meet up groups like the Dallas Drupal User Group, or general networking events around the Dallas/Fort Worth area, I’m counted on to bring in new business. Occasionally, a client will shift priorities or impose a tight deadline causing everyone in the company to hunker down and put on multiple hats.
While many companies would consider this a time to hit the panic button, LevelTen is actually very well equipped to handle situations like this. A few years ago, when we first decided to make the shift to Drupal, most of the company immersed themselves in it. We all went through Lynda.com’s Drupal Essential Training, read every book we could get our hands on, and watched all of the tutorials and demos we could find. Our CEO even orchestrated a company-wide Drupal competition. We were divided into small teams and tasked to come up with a fictitious business and bring it to life with a full-featured Drupal website. Every week we would test out new modules, play with configurations and present our team’s progress to the company. While it seemed like a tad much at the time, it proved to be a valuable learning experience for the whole company.
A recent client moved up their launch date, putting us in a tough spot to deliver on time. Their new website is quite large, but there was nothing incredibly complicated as far as custom programming goes. Instead of having our lead developer use his valuable time to do tasks I am capable of, I volunteered for site building duties, leaving him more time to handle the complex aspects of the site.
My first step was to create all content types, views, taxonomies, and menus. I had to refer back to my notes a few times from my Drupal intro days, but I got through it just fine. This allowed the developers to focus on creating the theme and getting the tricky design into Drupal. My next step was to populate the site with dummy content based on the content types I created. This allowed us to make sure all of the views were displaying correctly.
The cross training from a few years ago allowed us keep the work in-house and reach our goal in a fraction of the time it would have taken normally. I recommend cross training to companies who want to remain lean and profitable.
