Project Management

What you will learn:
Agile Methodology
Application of Agile Methodology to Projects
Agile tips and tricks applied to your daily life

Session Description:
Using real world, daily-life situations to explain Agile principles, I will demonstrate how an Agile mindset can cross over into optimizing your daily routine.

You did a Discovery but that doesn’t mean you have everything figured out. Once implementation starts, you’ll need a playbook to help bridge the gaps that inevitably arise throughout the project. We'll look at how Discovery phase activities and deliverables provide a foundation to build upon, and how to keep projects moving forward when you don't have all the answers up front.

Each project has its own workflow needs based on the the project's size and duration, the team's composition and experience, and the project management tools at hand. Whether you use Agile, Kanban, Waterfall, or some combination of these processes, it's important to have a PM workflow that suits your team and project.

In this session, we'll go over:

The fact is: Most digital projects fail- either because the budget is overspent, time is exceeded, or user aren't happy. 
 Even though the project launched, the end result failed to achieve some of it objectives or ended up costing much more then expected.   

That doesn't need to be the case. By applying “budget goggles” and drilling down to a time-boxed list of features  we can creates a common language for all stakeholders , sets expectations early on and save the project from failing.  

Don’t let your process lead you down the road to ruin, trust your instincts. As a generally intuitive person, I’ll talk about some of the more soft skills you can develop to ensure you can manage your project to success.

Metrics, spreadsheets, the latest and greatest agile tools are all incredible parts of getting projects done in this day and age, yet the softer skills that come from our intuitive or gut can often be just as critical in ensuring a project goes well.

Agile is often talked about in aspirational broad strokes, and as such feels divorced from real world challenges. Over time, the practices within experienced Agile teams can become calcified and dogmatic, which makes the methodology a process that comes before before individuals — and anathema to Agile’s core values.

It's important to remember that Agile Coaches are just coaches, not prophets. We have to serve the needs of our projects, not our processes.

This session will be about making Agile work in the real world:

GitHub so often is thought of as just source code and maybe an issue queue to report bugs. But, hidden in it is a powerful project management tool that can scale from a 5 person engineering team to a 50 person multidisciplinary team. From 1 repository to 100. Monoliths to microservices.

Why is working with clients so messy? I had a lot say on the matter with Client Wrangling and Project Management: Train Wrecks I and 2. And I do talk about reverse engineering in those presentations though only in passing so this gem is easily over-looked. Like a good fractal we're going to deep dive into the world of reverse engineering a Drupal site.

Even after 16 years of managing projects, I still learn from my clients. Each client is a unique snowflake, amazing and challenging all in one little package…or maybe not. It turns out that they aren’t as different as we might think. There are common traits and needs between them all.

In fact 8 lessons stand out to me as key to building successful client relationships. While I would love to say that I learned them all, I can’t, which is why they are so important. They are hard to learn because they involve people.

Being a great project manager is more than just timelines, budgets, scope, and knowing something about Agile. It’s about being the first player off the bench, the secret weapon, the switch-hitter. Our job is to fill in where needed to keep the project on track, help our team, and mitigate that darn risk. Our job is to be content strategists!