Ideas

Most enterprise Drupal sites are being maintained, not managed. Tickets get closed, and SLAs get met, but the gap between what reactive support produces and what stewardship produces is widening every quarter. Reactive support takes three predictable shapes: a single freelancer, an offshore ticket-based team, or an internal team squeezed into supporting what they built. None produces the dedicated ownership a website needs. Proactive stewardship looks different. It treats enterprise change management as the floor, runs operational processes around automated tooling, integrates AI specifically into testing and ticket analysis and internal tooling, and engages senior expertise on a regular cadence. The article includes seven questions a VP of Technology can take into their next QBR to diagnose whether their current Drupal partner is operating in a stewardship model or a maintenance one. By Mohammed Razem, CEO of Vardot.