We learned early on in the formation of PreviousNext that developers who are passionate and engaged in open source projects usually make great team members, so wanted to create a work environment where they could sustain this involvement. 

The first step was to determine how much billable work on client projects our developers needed to achieve in order for PreviousNext to be profitable and sustainable. The figure we settled on was 80%, or 32 hrs per week of billable hours of a full time week as the baseline. Team members then self manage their availability to fulfil their billable hours and can direct up to 20% of their remaining paid availability to code contribution or other community volunteering activities. 

From a project management perspective, our team members are not allowed to be scheduled on billable work more than 80% of their time, which is then factored into our Agile sprint planning and communicated to clients. If certain team members contribute more billable hours in a given week, this just accelerates how many tickets we can complete in a Sprint.

If individual team members aren’t involved or interested in contribution, we expect their billable hours rate to be higher in line with more traditional companies. We don’t mandate that team members use their 20% time for contribution, but find that the majority do due to the benefits it gives them outside their roles. 

These benefits include:

• Learning and maintaining best-practice development skills based on peer review by other talented developers in the global community.
• Developing leadership and communication skills with diverse and distributed co-contributors from many different cultures and backgrounds.
• Staying close to and often being at the forefront of new initiatives in Drupal, whether it be as a core code contributor or maintaining key modules that get used by hundreds of thousands of people. For example, the Video Embed Field that Sam Becker co-maintains is used on 123,487 websites and has been downloaded a staggering 1,697,895 times at the time of publishing. That’s some useful code!  
• Developing close working relationships with many experienced and talented developers outside PreviousNext. In addition to providing mentoring and training for our team, these relationships pay dividends when we can open communication channels with people responsible for specific code within the Drupal ecosystem.
• Building their own profiles within the community and being considered trusted developers in their own right by demonstrating a proven track record. After all, it’s demonstrated work rather than the CV that matters most. This often leads to being selected to provide expert talks at conferences and obviously makes them highly desirable employees should they ever move on from PreviousNext.
• If our team members do get selected as speakers at international Drupal events, PreviousNext funds their full attendance costs and treats their time away as normal paid hours.
• Working on non-client work on issues that interest them, such as emerging technologies, proof of concepts, or just an itch they need to scratch. We never direct team members that they should be working on specific issues in their contribution time.

All of these individual benefits provide clear advantages to PreviousNext as a company, ensuring our team maintains an extremely high degree of experience and elevating our company’s profile through Drupal’s contribution credit system. This has resulted in PreviousNext being consistently ranked in the top 5 companies globally that contribute code to Drupal off the back of over 1,000 hours of annual code contribution.

In addition to this 20% contribution time, we also ensure that most new modules we author or patch during client projects are open sourced. Our clients are aware that billable time during sprints will go towards this and that they will also receive contribution credit on Drupal.org as the sponsor of the contributions. The benefits to clients of this approach include:

• Open sourced modules they use and contribute to will be maintained by many other people in the Drupal community. This ensures a higher degree of code stability and security and means that if PreviousNext ceases to be engaged the modules can continue to be maintained either by a new vendor, their internal team or the community at large.
• Clients can point to their own contribution credits as evidence of being committed Drupal community supporters in their own right. This can be used as a key element in recruitment if they start hiring their own internal Drupal developers.

Beyond code contributions, PreviousNext provides paid time to volunteer on organising Drupal events, sit on community committees, run free training sessions and organise code sprints. This is then backed by our financial contributions to sponsoring events and the Drupal Association itself.

None of this is rocket science, but as a company reliant on open source software we view these contribution policies and initiatives as a key pillar in ensuring PreviousNext’s market profile is maintained and the Drupal ecosystem for our business to operate in remains healthy. 

We’re always happy to share insights into how your own organisation might adopt similar approaches, so please get in touch if you’d like to know more.