The tools were getting in the way
Marin County was nearly a year into moving from Sitecore to Acquia Site Studio. The deadline to retire the old CMS was getting closer, and the migration was behind schedule.
The county’s developers were having trouble with the platform. They couldn’t make the customizations they needed. Upgrades were difficult. There were bugs to work around. All while trying to get a new site out the door.
At some point, you have to ask whether the tools are helping.
We proposed moving away from Acquia’s proprietary tooling and building with open Drupal tools. The county needed a platform its developers could work with and maintain. They had enough work to do without fighting the thing they were building on.
Working with their team, we built the complete site platform in about a month. That didn’t mean every department had moved over. It meant the platform was ready for that work to happen.
Over the following nine months, 21 departments migrated onto it.
A platform your team can’t maintain isn’t a shortcut. It’s a second project running alongside the one you meant to do.