It's that time of year again. Where we take a step back from the day to day tasks we do here at Fuse and get a big picture of where we're at and where we want to be going. We'll start by discussing the problems with our current workflow and processes and discuss a hundred possible solutions. Then we break and hope for the best. This year, we're hoping for a bit more. We're going for simple actionable tasks and most importantly we're going for results.
This time around we took a more strategic direction. We started by dividing our entire business from start to finish into "business segments". The segments represent different "phases" and/or "processes" that a given project will travel through from marketing all the way to supporting our client's projects after deployment.
Our business segments:
- Marketing
- Sales
- Discovery and Scope Planning
- Information Architecture
- User Interface Design
- Infrastructure
- Drupal Configuration
- Drupal Theming
- Quality Insurance
- Deployment
- Training and Documentation
- Account Management
- Project Management
- Support and Hosting
Each business segment was given a short statement of intent to help us keep focus when determining our actionable goals. Somewhat of an overarching principle to follow for setting our sights on the target.
From there, we started coming up with issues or goals that we had within each segment. During the goals brainstorming session we tried to adhere to the S.M.A.R.T. method of defining our objectives as closely as possible. So where we once had, "Sell More" we now have; "Sell x number of dollars by the end of this quarter over the same time last year". The beauty here is we have a time frame, a measure and depending on what x is, a realistic goal that we can successfully accomplish.
The best part about this process is that our segments cover every facet of our business so everyone is on board and collaborating towards a collective goal of making Fuse Interactive both an awesome company to work for as well as a leader in the Drupal community.
We're still in the early stages of the revitalization project, but we're trucking along at a steady pace and we'll be keeping you posted on our progress.
Do you work for a Development company that has re-evaluated your workflow and processes? Let us know how you went about it and what your successes and failures were in the comments!