Jochen has been appointed DevOps track chair for this year’s DrupalCon Prague. He’s been busy this week with collecting candidates for the track’s featured talk slot.

Because we’re still not nearly as strong on the sales and marketing front as with technical topics, we got us some outside help. On Wednesday, we met with our coach Ute in Frankfurt for a sales and marketing workshop. She helped us tremendously with improving our processes, for example regarding follow-ups on quotes. We’ve got ourselves a long list of homework that will keep us busy over the next few weeks.

With our office assistant Susanne, we’ve streamlined our accounting processes, which at least those customers might have noticed that have overdue invoices.

We’ve also improved our internal communication. Because a daily standup call at a fixed time doesn’t fit with our anywhere/anytime work style, we decided to move it to email. Now, we’re getting an automated email in the morning asking for a retrospective of the previous work day, an outlook on today’s work, obstacles that could cause problems, and suggestions for improving our work. Everyone answers with their personal list of things and is encouraged to start discussions by responding to a coworker’s status. This asynchronous daily exchange has proven far less intrusive than a scheduled conference call. It’s at the same time more efficient because status mails tend to be quite concise while our calls often deteriorated quickly into smalltalk. And not to worry – we still have enough face time in hangouts on focused topics, so we don’t run the risk of becoming estranged to each other.

Have a great weekend, everyone!