I’ll go over all of the tools that I live and die by, because it’s the question I get asked most often.

What tool is going to be my magical robot pony and fix all of my project management woes?

I’m sorry, but I’m going to level with you here: There is no ‘project management tool to rule them all’. It’s going to be the one that has enough of the features you really need (and this list is different for everyone!): time-tracking, ticket creating, milestone making, invoicing, version-control connecting, report making, whiz-bang graphical burndown charts, etc… But it also has few enough features that you don’t get distracted by what else the tool could do for you.

Resist the urge to go all in and find the tool that does absolutely everything. My biggest line for a tool is: Am I decently happy when I’m using it? This is very nebulous, but I want something that doesn’t frustrate me. It doesn’t have to think as fast as I do, but it shouldn’t get in the way of getting my work done.  Thus far, only Klok and I have stayed friends. And Klok’s just a beautiful time tracker.

A year ago, we had people interested in project management, but not a whole lot of people actually doing it in Drupal. This morning, we had the Project Manager Birds of a Feather session in a room that ended up being standing room only. Sure, there were a few laptop dwellers (and sometimes I’m one of them), but with roughly 40-50 people there, it’s the biggest PM BoF I’ve seen in the year and some change of getting really involved in Drupal community. So thanks.

We also had a panel today on The Care and Feeding of Project Managers, which was a lot of fun. The hour went by fast, with conversations about backgrounds, where we come from, but how we’re all sortof on the same page about how we build our processes.

The four of us (myself moderating, Wendy Iguchi, Chris Strahl, Crystal Williams, on the panel realized that project managers in Drupal haven’t really committed much back to the project itself. Just because there isn’t really a space for that in drupal.org is, realistically, no excuse, and I’ll be the first to say that I haven’t done a good job of putting my own work anywhere useful to folks. To paraphrase Dries, ‘Talk is silver, documentation is gold’.

I’m not sure where things will go from here, because the firehose of crazy projects + conferences + life is totally here, but I’ll be spending some time in the coming months on giving back.

Hope to see some of you in the Managing Expectations talk tomorrow morning, too early!

A SMART goal is: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timed. List each of the nebulous things you want to do. Use deadlines that are already fixed. For example: end of the year, before the next class starts.

Specific: I want to have more people in this class that I am giving.

Measurable: I want at least 5% more people here for the whole class, not just the first session.

Attainable: 5% is a reasonable goal. 500% for a first goal would be unadvisable.

Revelent: Yeah, I struggle with this too. Is this really important to what I’m doing?

Timed: Deadlines, they’re useful. They’ll get you to action. Let’s say that the class starts in a month.

Now you know what you want?

Here’s how I get there:

I use Remember The Milk for my own projects, things that I want to get done. I have about 10 different ‘buckets’, which are targeted lists, so that I don’t end up getting distracted from one list to another. Getting more people into a class that I’m giving would fall under my ‘Worktime’ lists. So, start at the end: ‘Class Starts May 1st’. Now work backwards: Who’s your ideal candidate? How many people do you need to tell about it? Those are two different steps. The ideal candidate profile is something I should start working on right away, so I’ll have that due at the end of today, April 1st. It doesn’t have to be long, but I should know who I’m looking for. How many people do I have to ask is harder, but not impossible, break it down into: 30 people, 60 people, 90 people. Despite the fact that it’s Thursday and the end of the week, I want to put out a mass mailing for the first 30 people that I need to talk to by next Tuesday morning, April 6. (Timing email newsletters and useful correspondence is another post.)

Thus far, we’ve got two tasks:

• ‘Ideal Candidate Profile’, end of day.
• 30 people mailing, Tuesday, April 6th.

You can’t do the mailing until you know who you’re looking for, and there’s a hidden task in there after you’re done with the candidate profile. Your to-do list in the 5 days between has: Go through the mental rolodex and identify who needs to be in that 30 person first target area.

Haul out your calendar, because dates in calendar are much closer than they appear. You’ll want to followup with those 30 people to see who’s really interested, if you got your ideal candidate right, and if you need to adjust that. Take a subset of 6 from those 30, and make sure that you get to that by Thursday, April 9th. You’ve got the 60 people to pester on April 13th, so broadening the net at little wider, and the 90 people to ask by April 20th, so continue to add the ‘sifting through the mental rolodex’ tasks, and creating that correspondence.

• ‘Ideal Candidate Profile’, end of day.
• Mental Rolodex Sifting for the 30 most suited people
• 30 people mailing, Tuesday, April 6th.
• Follow up with 6 of those candidates that you think would be the most intestested, re-evaluate profile, Thursday, April 9
• Re-sort through the network for 60 people, possibly not as suited
• 60 people Mailing, Tuesday, April 13
• Follow up with 15 people from that list, Friday, April 16th

Now shake the bushes and attempt to get 90 people who might be vaguely interested.
*

90 People Mailing, Tuesday, April 20th.

By this point, everyone and their mother should be aware that you’re giving the class. You’ll probably assume that you’ll get questions, or you’ll want to be able to provide more information on your own website, without really spamming everyone.

• Page on Website describing Class, Pricing, Location, Duration, everything anyone might reasonably want to know, Up by Sunday, April 4th.

You’ll want to link to that in all of your direct marketing emails. Think about what other trade groups might be interested in coming and learning as well, but add those people to your 30-60-90 groups. Everyone’s going to be hearing from you, but if you’re going to meet your goals, push yourself on this one.

—-

We’ve gotten to two weeks before the class. You’ve paid attention to your reminders, and you’ve gone and shaken the bushes. Hopefully, your hard work is paying off and people are signing up in droves. However, you’ve also given yourself a good cushion to be able to evaluate what’s working, what’s not working, and where you can improve. Now’s the time where you’re setting a plan in place for the class to succeed, because you know you’re going to have enough people in the door.

Can you use other systems? Of course. The most important part is: Once you’ve set yourself deadlines, let something else hold you accountable to them. Writing them down is not enough, have something else nag you about them, because it’s too easy to put them in a text file and never look at it again. BaseCamp, OpenAtrium, Google Calendar + Tasks, or any number of systems will fit this bill for you. But the short answer on the Best Task System Ever is: anything that you like to use and will be able to meaningfully remind you.

• WordPress is a CMS that’s built for blogging. This is primarily a blog.
• I create content here. I’m not trying to integrate a legacy system with lots of data and lots of users, I’m not trying to put a lot of media that needs to be very stable, and I’m not trying to create a completely search-optimised web presence. Yet. I’m working too hard doing that for other people to really do it for myself.
• I really like how WordPress ‘gets out of the way’ of your experience for creating good stories in text.
• I appreciate the experience of logging into my own site, swearing at it because ‘I can’t find X’, where X is something I’m very familiar with in one system, and forget all the time in others. It keeps me honest, and remembering what the content creation experience is like for the vast majority of CMS users.

So whenever you find me, and you want to know the answers about ‘Wait! You’re really involved in Drupal! Why does your own site run on WordPress?’
That’s why.
It probably won’t always be on WordPress; I may at some point decide to plan out msamye 2.0, and then I’ll start writing about the process of change, evaluating solutions to fit your needs, and actually doing it.

I’ve been working on chapters for Definitive Drupal 7 about project planning and managing a major project. It’s supposed to come out this fall, we hope!, and this one’s been on my plate for awhile. I’m about half-way through the “Planning a Project” chapter, and I’m noticing a theme in my writing. It’s very subtle.

It goes a little like this:‘Don’t kill yourselves off. You are no good to us dead. Make reasonable goals. Don’t do anything you don’t think you can do.’ Which is fun, because there’s also the theme of ‘Drupal can do almost anything. Be really excited about all of the stuff that it can do.’ (The hard part is figuring out where the hell that ‘almost’ lies, and your own limitations, and what else you’ve got to go learn.)

And then I scurried off to a meeting and sortof lived it. ‘Tell me stories. Oh, holy god, that is more than I can do, you do need an experienced team. Stop right there while I make a call. Ok, these people! Go!’
I had really mixed feelings about calling Uncle and we find someone else to play, because it could have been a lot of fun. But it’s all about delegation right now, finding those things where I’m doing exactly what I’m good at, other people are doing what they’re good at, and it’s sortof like Plato’s idea of Justice is coming alive in the world. (Lyza will appreciate the strange parallels. As near as I remember it, Plato’s ideal of justice was everyone doing exactly what they were meant to.)

But when ultimately, it can work out for the best and you’ve pointed folks down the right path, it’s the point where you invoke the ‘Glass of Wine’ rule and call it off for a bit.

The Glass of Wine rule is a post all its own.

As is how I’m working in Jersey Shore references into the Planning a Project chapter. We’ll see if it stays in.

Cute, neh?

Saturday was sessions all day, with highlights include: Josh Konig talking about Drupal in the Cloud, Sam Boyer talking about Panels, Damien Tournoud talking about Drupal 7, and Bill Fitzgerald talking about Views. An international rockstar DrupalCamp, clearly. (There were also great conversations over sushi, showing out of towners more of the beautiful city of Portland, and appreciating Portland’s great microbrews.)

Yeah, I gave a session on project management.

I’ve spent the last few days in San Francisco deeply buried in Drupal and the future of Ubercart, and am flying up to Vancouver this afternoon to work with the D7CX initiative. We’ll be posting more about that in conjunction with BadCamp and the Drupal 7 Contributed Module sprint this weekend.
In fact, in almost every region of the US and Canada, there’s a Drupal event going on. Drupal Events Calendar
No, I’m serious.

See you all in Vancouver!

In retrospect, this is one of the best choices I think I’ve made. It has also been one of the most frustrating and rewarding choices.

I was fortunate to come into Drupal with an open mind, enough web development experience to ask the right questions, enough project management experience to not really screw up. At first. I got better at screwing up later on. It’s a really valuable skill: recognize when you’re screwing up because you didn’t ask the right questions, because you’re in the wrong position or when you didn’t answer the right question. I’m still getting better at that.

It’s frustrating because as a non-developer, getting into the Drupal communities has an extra layer of complexity to it. It’s like learning a foreign language where the first three weeks that you’re listening in, you’re trying to distinguish what sounds are words.

It’s frustrating because as you’re learning, you’re not quite sure of the questions you’re asking. You’re learning the vocabulary with the technologies. You’re pretty sure that when something doesn’t work like it intended, there’s a good reason for it, but you’re ignorant of the starting place.

But once you get past that whole learning curve part, there’s a whole bunch of people who are genuinely amazing and want to see more people get involved. They want the CMS project to succeed, and they want it to be useful. They want to use it to build easier to use websites, websites that scale better, websites that are easier to design for and still have the immense vastness of possibility that Drupal has.
That’s the rewarding part, and it is why I keep doing this.

It’s why I go to the DrupalCons, and interact with as many people as possible. Developers, project managers, business-side: we’re all living in the same sort of washing machine. DrupalCons are about trying to add as many new points of light to your own Drupal resource universe, whether that’s people or modules or integration strategies or new companies to partner with. It’s about being able to meet up and discuss hard problems in person, where communications are easier and you put faces to familiar names. And then I come back to Portland and play with the open source communities and try to figure out what other places do better, and what Drupal has to learn. (Also, what Drupal has to teach to the open source communities.)

This is why I do project management for a living, and community organizing for fun. Somewhere in here the stories of being an independent project manager will come out, but in the meantime, this is a ‘happy to be here’ post. DrupalCamp Portland kicks off Friday night, but that deserves its own separate post.

This is the ‘about me’ part. This is the personal website of Amye Scavarda, a ridiculous web citizen. I’m currently based out of Portland, OR involved in the open source community. Things that are near and dear to my heart are: community outreach, project management, and how to make people’s dreams of websites come true.

My current projects include OpenSourceBridge and all things tech conference related, understanding Drupal, WordPress and other open source CMS technologies, and making them more useful to users. Expect to see more of the same, interspersed with hilarious stories about life in Portland.