Balanced Scorecard

1. Maintain margins

1.1. stronger review of scope and requirements

1.1.1. maybe have estimates done in two parts. initially just do a design review and then give an estimate for the development once we a better idea of what we are building

1.1.2. Break out discovery from ticket writing

1.2. Begin tracking actual impementation times in dev plans

2. Develop and promote industry thought leaders

2.1. Create a blog post publication cycle with demands of each department

2.2. host meetups

2.3. contribute to open source / open source internal tech

2.4. Internal Development Group

2.5. maybe an interactive office map would help to find each other and rooms

2.6. Tie thought leadership goals to senior and principal roles

3. Grow revenue

3.1. expand our drupal portfolio

3.2. rob bank downstairs

4. Increase number of services used by new/existing clients

4.1. Leverage AEM integration with other Adobe products, such as Marketing Cloud

4.2. Build tools/enhancements for clients in such a way that we can easily repackage and sell to other clients.

4.3. An Internal Development team can R&D or polish up client work to proof of concept offerings such as Mobile Apps or other offerings that could be added to our 'reusable assets'.

4.4. An Internal Development team can R&D or polish up client work to proof of concept offerings such as Mobile Apps or other offerings that could be added to our 'reusable assets'.

5. Strengthen the Velir Brand

5.1. Create new tech blog for quick dev posts.

5.2. Maybe a greater focus on Non-profit companies or industries that are of that nature (helping people)

5.3. Allow time for internal data visualization intiatives to showcase new technologies and increase awareness of Velir in the Data viz community

6. Expand service offerings

6.1. Automate website audits to the greatest extent possible. Use these tools on our own website builds

7. Retain existing accounts

7.1. Offer a discount on licenses if they sign up for support contract

7.2. Consider providing modules or upgrades of modules for free based on size or duration of account

8. Deliver a superior customer experience

8.1. Create a private area in Jira for Velir only comments

8.2. Polish the deliverables so things we present to clients always look good.

8.3. Develop websites with real content from the start of the project

8.4. Solve Design QA once and for all

8.5. Hit a 90% acceptance rate in UAT. Do not treat clients as a QA resource

9. Align delivery processes to customer needs

9.1. Eff those guys

9.2. try adopting a better MVP approach. build just what is need to create a production viable website first

9.3. Setup out internal development environments to match the live setups, if they are using a distributed environment make sure that the internal dev envrionments are also setup that way to avoid issues

9.4. Ensure the entire team interacts with the customer - WHILE MINIMIZING MEETINGS, be targeted

10. Improve consistency of delivery

10.1. Integrate Dev planning into Jira

10.2. Set and use performance budgets on all projects

10.2.1. Identify the things/trends that will destroy our performance budget

10.3. better consistency with gulp tasks on projects, especially with CI

10.4. Internal Sitecore site, an example of our current recommended technology stack. Using re-usable components.

10.5. Use automated tools to ensure all deliveries meet our standards (testing, code guidelines, comments)

10.5.1. Use automated browser testing framework (Selenium / CodedUI)

10.5.1.1. Craft Feature issues from a behavioral driven development mindset to help drive expected and testable outcomes

10.5.2. Use KPI profiling as part of our CI build process. Think nightly performance profiling, with reports on deltas between builds

10.6. Developers should review tickets BEFORE they are submitted to client for approval. This would cut back on risk and over-promising

10.6.1. To piggy back on this, have the devs more involved with the initial definitions of tickets/features to avoid gaps and set reasonable expectations

10.6.2. Have SAs write tickets in a consistent manner and written in such a way any developer new to the project can complete the task

10.7. Invest in code review tools such as Fisheye/Crucible

11. Create reusable assets

11.1. Allow devs to pitch internal projects with possibility of being resourced if deemed valuable.

11.2. Add personalization functionality to the Reuse library

11.3. Invest in our modules, treat them as projects then sell "licenses" to clients as part of projects. Examples: Image Cropper, Velir Search

11.4. Identify gaps in reusable development accelerators, and build

11.5. Give more time to documentation and cleanup of internal libraries and code to make the integration process more consistent and easier

11.6. Create/improve documentation for reusable assets such as the Velir Search library

11.7. Internal Sitecore site, Keeping this up to date with examples of new components that can be re-used for project work. With documentation about how they're used.

11.8. Bring teams together to agree on architecture, because front-end is a moving target

11.9. Reusable libraries should go thru standalone QA. Currently, bugs for reusable libraries are only caught after they're integrated into projects

11.10. capture requirements for reusable libraries, to allow them to be tested later

11.11. hardcore plan around development, versioning and deployment of libraries to projects.

12. Forecast, recruit, and resource effectively

12.1. host meetups, for recruiting

12.2. Keep some % of resources available, or working on internal projects, so they can fill resourcing gaps without affecting other client work

12.3. For forecasting, keep better track of actual hours spent on previous similar projects. (knowledge management)

12.4. Track average time to build components and integration, feed that into future estimates

13. Create a skill development and onboarding strategy

13.1. Create an in-house training class for new Sitecore developers that encompasses, Sitecore, Glass, and TDS to alleviate shadowing burden (Internal sitecore site I've added to other focus areas could be a training path of implementing our technology stack across all departments)

13.2. Design a protocol so developers are responding to email communications

13.3. Host some training for non-violent communication

14. Establish career progression pathways

14.1. Clear and centralized list of roles within the company, including expectations and prereqs

14.2. Allow more flexibility in roles with cross-discipline opportunities

15. Establish individual performance expectations

15.1. Establish "retros" even for Waterfall projects and evaluate estimates vs. actuals

16. Invest in knowledge management

16.1. Internal Sitecore site, an example of our current recommended technology stack. and employee database. Employee and project pages will have taxonomy of technologies, projects, employees.

16.2. SAs should go thru training for the platform they're working with (attend Sitecore Training, Drupal Training, etc)

16.3. Create a knowledge data platform: Record all meetings, client calls. Use NLP (speech->text) to categorize & index all data

16.4. Establish a wiki with common development pitfalls /weird errors in Sitecore. Something searchable and editable so we can benefit from knowledge gathered on other projects. Emails not effective form of historical issues on the devs email list

16.5. document UI interactions, and client/server model inside JIRA tickets using plain english

16.6. Make it someone's job to organize all the info on the wiki, support.velir.com, project readme, etc into a single resource.

16.7. Treat these tasks like project tasks so that they do not constantly get trumped by project work

16.8. Move Wiki based resources to more secure support site things like resources and password information

16.9. Formalize component specs for front-end, i.e. atomic design component inventories. much easier to task out and estimate vs. pile o' designs