 Hello, my name is Allison. I'd like to share with you the most amazing slides. Hello, my name's Joelle Black. These slides have lots of tips that you can really use. It has so many awesome parts. You simply won't believe how much these slides will help your work. You can. Put down your coffee now and listen as we give you ways to make your project sing. A helpful guide. With lots of slides? Super fun! Hello! With music and some visuals, we'll show you how it's done. You win? That's great! Let's get this started then. You simply won't believe how much this step will change your life. This step will change your life. This step will change your life. Managing projects. Hello! My name's Joelle Black. I'm a senior project manager and web strategist at Palantir.net. I'm here to talk a little bit about how we run projects from start to finish as project managers. Now, really great musicals tell the story of some kind of journey. Sometimes it's a love story. But more often than not, it's a story of overcoming some kind of odds and obstacles to make something really great happen in the end. And if you think about it, is that really what all of our Drupal Web projects really are when you think about it? Musicals just have this really, really great way of using song and a little bit of dance to advance the plot. So it only seems natural that we would want to take a musical to talk about project management, am I right? So over the next hour or so, we're here to talk a little bit about different types of communication, give some tips, and a couple of different tools that you can use to better manage your own projects. Now, if you're not a big Broadway fan, don't worry. We'll let you know when it's time to sing along. And we promised that in addition to being very, very musical throughout the entire thing, we're also going to be very, very informative, or at least we hope so. Can you hear us in the back? All right. So we hope that you find it to be very, very informative. Now if you are a Broadway fan, just wait just for two more slides, and I've got something just for you. Throughout the presentation, you're going to see our Twitter handles, Joe Allen Black, Allison Manley, and then our hashtag, Key in the Musical. Be our critics. Let us know what you like, what you don't like, and give us ways that we can improve. And like I said, things that you do like, too. Real quick, before we get too far in, I've got a quick disclaimer for you. Neither of us is a professional singer, so just think of this as, you know, really, really great karaoke. And that's out of that. So like I said, we had something for the folks that are Broadway fans or fans of musicals. Inside your playbook, you should see a half sheet of paper that's got a series of blank lines. Throughout the show, as you can hear us do different songs from different musicals, if you're able to fill that out and let us know where the songs come from, bring it on up here at the end, and you'll be entered for a $25 gift card to think each, which is pretty rad, right? Consider the audience. And with that, let's begin. Let's start at the very beginning. I mean, seriously, what song did you think we'd start with? A very good place to start. When you read, you begin with? ADC. When we work, we begin with? Contracting. Contracting. The first real step just happens to be? Contracting. Contracting. Don't we all love contracting? So this is Allison. She's going to be the hero in a Mark's story. Think of her as Julie Andrews in every story that you love growing up, except that she doesn't really skip with the guitar or go up, you know, staircase backwards. She talks more about sprint points, velocity, and gear, but other than that, it's almost kind of sort of the exact same thing. So Allison has just been assigned a new project. What is the first phase, the first thing that she needs to worry about in this project? Totally just saying about it. Contracting, yes. Before she does anything else, Allison has to clearly understand the contract. This is the backbone of any project, and this is what's really going to make a project really work. So we have to be pretty explicit with what we've got in a contract. So let's all together, let's list out the needs of your statement of work. Scope, you must spell out the scope. Cost. Define the payment terms. Date. If you're unavailable. Clear. Here, deliverables list. Clarity. Clarity on excursions from higher up. With any agency or any project, generally you're going to have a contract that, again, is going to be the backbone of what you work on. Your contracts might be structured a little bit differently, and they might have different phrases, but generally, here's some key features that, again, you might have a different word, but key features that you want to make sure, as a project manager, before you do anything else, you clearly understand what these items are. Deliverables are the things that, you know, this is what your site is going to be. What are the things that your client is paying you to do? What are you planning to deliver at the end of your project? We have scope. This is the totality of your project. What is the space you're working in? Is it going to be multiple sites? Is it going to be a single one? Know your scope. Just as important as knowing what's in, it's also knowing what's out. When your contract is drafted, there's a good number of things that might have been excluded, for whatever reason, costs, time, resources, something might have been excluded. And knowing that upfront, as you're building your project plan before you get too much further, it's really important to have a clear idea of what's out, just as much as you know what's in. Also important are knowing the assumptions. There was a cost that a price tag probably put on your contract. And some of that was fake of the idea that certain things would be in. Certain things would be out. Some things would be easy. Some things would be really hard. Having a clear idea of what those are as your assumptions upfront from your scope of work or from your contract is very, very important. And documenting those things as you move throughout the project. Definitely something that's easy to forget as you get in. So definitely make sure at the beginning of your project, you have a really clear idea of what that is. You also want to know the schedule. Somebody somewhere, determine the project to be 28, 6 months, a year and a half project, whatever it happens to be. Make sure that you have a clear idea of what that schedule is so that way you can make sure to deliver at whatever timeline is originally estimated. And we all like to get paid at the end of the day. So make sure you know what those payment terms are. Are you having something where you have to do a series of milestones? Are you on a flat fee? Whatever those payment terms happen to be. You want to make sure as a project manager you know what those are. You're lining those up and your project plan works accordingly as it's originally approved. We then need to make sure that as project managers want you to know what's in that contract, we're very, very organized. We seldom brought our team into place yet. We probably haven't made a lot of contact as a project team in the client. It's really important that we make sure that we get very organized. Think of it as starting a quest. What are the rings, fellowships of this way to many metaphors? I'll stop that train. But we want to make sure that Alison's able in this project that she was just assigned to create an atmosphere of transparency and collaboration throughout the project. At Palatine we like to use JIRA. It's a great system to be able to organize at a very granular level and also at a higher level so people can see what's going to be delivered and when. We also use RedMind in the past, which is a similar ticketing system. I've used on projects before Trello for allegedly use base camp. There's various other ways as project managers we can make sure that everybody has an understanding of what all the work needs to be and how that work is going to be handled. So making sure that you have that tool set up and it's in place for everybody right off the bat as a huge help. I'd also like to immediately start a risk law. So those things that we had as assumptions or things that were exceptions make sure that that's all documented. If something goes wrong, what's our mitigation strategy? At the beginning of a project it's a lot easier to figure out, well if this feature blows up, what are we going to do? So making sure that you have those things documented and it's in a visible way right off the bat is great. You also make sure you're tracking your time. And you definitely don't want to bring team members on or if the first meeting you're tracking is not worth a long time without meeting. So making sure to set that time tracking up initially is great. A project manager is going to be a key person for communication. So making sure that we've got tools in place, whether that's Slack, you might pick up the phone, I don't know. Whatever those communication paths are, making sure that you've got those documented and making sure that you have a really great way to do that. And then we also like to use lots of Google folders for all of our project artifacts. So six months in, you know exactly, hey where did that wireframe go? Where were those notes or whatever we're working on? You want to make sure that that's all in a nice easy spot and finding many different tools around there but Google folders seem to be the trick pretty easily. And they're very, very shareable. Once Allison's gotten her team organized, she wants to make sure that there's really clear communication on what everybody's roles and responsibilities are. You don't want to get several weeks into the project and everybody's pointing at each other going, hey where's kind of like those girits I guess. Figuring that out right off the bat, having a clear idea of what those are and then making sure that everybody understands that. So a couple key questions that are really great to start a project off with I found are asking who's in charge of the overall vision. Sometimes as a project manager that might be us. Might be a strategist. Might be an executive sponsor. But whomever is going to be that driver of the overall vision. Having that understanding right off the bat and getting back to the user stories. Who's going to actually sit down and write those? It's a year, year and a half long project. That's going to be a lot of user stories. Probably want to budget some time for that and know who has to do that or which team is going to do that. Are we going to be having split schedules and then also do we have the resourcing in place? Can we make sure that everybody has the amount of time they need to be the work that they expect to do? So getting back to this project it's an end to end project that Allison has just assigned. It's a higher ed client. We're going to have a six member team and halfway through we might decide I don't know, call it an intermission. Halfway through we're going to have a little bit of a break. And then we've also got a team member who's going to be on vacation pretty soon. So now that Allison's got all the ducts in a row she understands her contract. She's prepared for all the work that's to come. There's a schedule for feds and designers. I got dashboards set up for my client. My spreadsheets are flyin' they're on Google Drive. And I'm told the deposit check finally arrived. Oh what an organized project. Oh what a beautiful day. I've got a wonderful fit. This project will be... In case you're wondering Chats are not necessary in every project. Whether you want that your toolkit or not is not my call. So once you've got your team organized you have a good idea of what's in your contract you generally want to lead directly into one of your kickoffs. It's the first time that your full project team will be meeting with the client team. You want to make sure that you're taking a really good chance to get to know the project to understand what's going to be a part of it. And our PM's play is going to get pretty full pretty quick in here. You want to make sure that in your kickoff you do a couple of key things. You want to make sure you're defining the goals of your project. And you want to make sure that the shared understanding person A might think one thing person B wants another thing. You want to make sure that the actual project plan is a really clear idea of what it is. And again, making sure that there's consensus. You don't want a whole group of people in a room to walk away from your kickoff meetings with different understandings of what you're going to deliver at the end. It's not going to set anybody up for success at that point. You want to make sure that you're listening and learning along the way. Your clients are going to be the subject matter experts. People that know their content really well and know what they're trying to achieve and our goal when they pick off and that first time meeting with them is to really get a key understanding of their expectations. There's a couple of things that, again, we talked about were excluded. Making sure that everybody understands those and any risks that are going on. But at the end of the day, it's about building trust and relationships with your clients. As a project manager, you want to make sure that you're studying the agenda. You're helping working with your team to set that agenda. You need to determine which meetings you need. Make sure you get the right stakeholders, and so I'm probably too sick for that. So as a project manager, making sure that all of that happens in a very detailed way. Plan different exercises and making sure that everything is clearly understood. These agendas can sometimes get pretty detailed. In the links that we'll give you at the end, we'll give you a downloaded copy so you're welcome to use our templates if you'd like to move them forward. But as much as you're really getting into all this agenda planning and learning about your client, you need to know your client. Getting to know you Getting to know all about you Sticking out exceptions Drawing a lot on whiteboards Getting to know you Writing your thoughts down with more Because of these new things I'm learning about you Different exercises that we're going to do as a part of most of our onsites. My favorite is empathy mapping which Allison just sang about. Take a sheet of paper, split it up into a couple of different regions. Seeing, saying, feeling, doing. Put yourself in the position of any of your personas. So if you're working on a higher ed client, think of potential students that are coming there. What are they seeing when they're going to your site? What are they feeling? Again, project managers, we love sticky notes and we love markers. We put down different thoughts about what that might be. And really gaining an understanding of what your different personas are really early. We'll help make sure that everybody kind of understands what's going on in the project. It's a really good idea when we start prioritizing features or different wording and different phrases. And the tool can end up being really, really helpful. Our project manager might also lead an information architecture workshop which is making sure that we have a clear idea of what the different labels and menus are in our site. How all the content fits together and interacts together. And it does have a little bit of an opportunity to have more sticky notes. We find though that also on all of our kickoffs and all of our onsites, the more we can build collaboration, the better off we are. You're able to get a better understanding of what your clients needs are. And the more that you're able to work together, you find that the possibilities really become unlimited. Together we're unlimited Together we'll be the greatest team there's ever been. Joe cites the way we planned them If we were in tandem There's no site we cannot build Just you, just you and We're just going to leave that one up there for a minute because it makes me happy. We started off small at the beginning talking about very beginnings and you need to know your client. We broke up into a series of big exercises Entity mapping, architecture workshops. And then it's really important at the end to again bring it home make sure that you've got a small set of takeaways that you're able to work through. A couple of different workshops we found are great at the very end. My favorite is the one up here on the right. It's the number one thing that Paladir needs to get right. If you're able to work with stakeholders and you're able to identify that number one thing document that number one thing and then keep referring back to it you can make sure that you have a better launch and really helping you make sure that everybody is all together. A couple of other tools that we find to work out really well are asking people to really identify what's in, what's out. We like to make sure that kickoffs and those types of meetings definitely spur the idea that really great ideas can come from things. Sometimes those might need to be a phase two or phase three or phase, that wasn't fine yet. So making sure that we document those as early as we possibly can. And then also most projects come down to a couple of key things, quality, scope, budget and time. We like to make sure quality is not the thing that we ever let slip. But sometimes it's your scope that has to get smaller because of your time or your budget. So talking directly to the client to go hey you know what, time scope or budget which are those ones is the key piece. So once you're done with this onsite and this kickoff meeting you're now able to really start kicking into our project. And everything's going to start going smoothly. We've got our scheduling in place from our getting organized, we know our contract really well. And then we've got that one aforementioned vacation that we talked about for one of our developers. Our PM's going to have to juggle accordingly. You're going to Argentina I'll have to make some adjustments throughout the project with my persistence we'll meet our deadlines despite your distance. We've now moved into our strategy and discovery phase. We've gotten organized, we have a key idea of what's going on in the project and now we need to really dig out the best way to make it work. We generally do that for our strategy and discovery phase. Our PM's job is now shifting a little bit. We tend to have a strategist who takes much more of a lead in this phase of a project. So our PM's job is really making sure that she's able to remove blockers and she's able to keep the team moving. A couple of different tasks that our team members might be doing might involve content strategy, auditing all the content to see what we got, working on taxonomy or user mappings. We might start working through Google Analytics to see different data that are on the site and how users are interacting with the site as it is right now. We might start working through usability testing and different surveys of the audience and if clients have past research, definitely want to be able to dig into that. Our development team might also start working on some foundational development work, making sure that we're able to start a project and we're able to have the specs and also starting to figure out what different fields would be a part of the project. Our PM during this, and you're going to hear this a few times as we move into other phases, but our PM's job is making sure that she's able to help the team gather the data they need. Also making sure that she's able to help analyze that feedback from the client and making sure that there's unblocked problems, really keeping things moving along. For this project, we're working on a higher-ed client. We know that there's going to be a couple of key performance indicators and things that are going to mean jobs on this website. For a higher-ed client, often these tend to be how do we make a pathway to applying online, signing up for campus tours, filling out financial aid forms. It's important to know all of these things at the beginning of a project, exactly the jobs we want the site to do. Allison knows a lot about higher-ed space so she's in a good spot to measure the project. $25,600 million We're 25,000 users each night 525,600 minutes How do you measure your KPIs in bounces, in sessions, in page views, in traffic entry in exits, in brand or type of device 525,600 minutes How do you measure your KPIs portions of time? We also have a clear idea of what the site is going to be doing and how we're going to measure it. We like to move into our design phase where the team really works to make sure that we've got a visual interface that works in tandem with the strategy that we've identified. We have a couple of key phases or parts that we are generally going to be taking in the project when we hit the design phase. We generally start with style tiles. These are not layouts. Think of them as those mood boards you see on HGTV where they've got a nice different colors and different patterns and textures. We do the similar thing with the website where we try to show what types of fonts, what types of wording, photography we might have. Get an idea of the feel of the site that we want. When we start working through design concepts we'll start with some wire phones. These are our layouts where you show hierarchy. Generally these won't have font treatments or photos in them, but it really meant to go is this bit of information more important than this bit of information? We jam those two together and they become our design talks. At the same time our clients are going to see in probably a Photoshop or Illustrator form what a couple of key pages at home page or something else might look like. We move directly into prototyping from there where we try to spend as much of our time in design as possible. Where we provide a living style guide where clients are able to see what it's going to look like on mobile and tablet forms as well as desktop, of course. You can see how those all come together. Our PM, like we talked about before, is still making sure that we're scheduling all of your meetings. We're really unblocking everybody to make sure that there's no log jams in the system. We're also making sure to document all of the decisions and making sure that things keep moving. So as the process starts to come to an end Allison's scheduled meetings with the clients and stakeholders to present work and everybody's going to be super, super excited. But unfortunately, as with all Grand Brock operas we're bound to run into an evil thing and our first one is going to be this approval from our state holders. So just when things seem like they're going to be smooth sailing, one important stakeholder might give a problem. And our part of our PM's job is to help inform the internal and external teams exactly how we made the decisions that we did to get where we are and figure out how we're going to keep moving forward. Our crafty and diplomatic project manager has to navigate some tricky waters. So really, how is she going to play cave all those voices in the room? Our client seems to have some fears that our direction isn't clear perhaps their needs aren't being fully met. This is the time to keep in mind that ass is on the line but they need to know we've got their back in so pointing to all the research helps the stakeholder to calm down calm down having open conversations helps that stakeholder to calm down it's the most efficient way efficient way Once we've gotten over that hurdle and the line phase is complete, the client is happy and we're trying for that break in the middle what do we call it? Oh, that's right an intermission. What do you think he's got way? He's going on better. I don't know where he got the people with that. Where he got the people with that? I'll say mine. How's Hank? He's doing well. Before we got here we were watching him a dog get here on his doggy can. I'll figure it out. He probably should get started. The client's not back yet. They're not back yet? They're not back yet. All right. Last time on project management the musical we started by understanding the contract of our project we moved directly into a kickoff an onsite meeting where we really tried to gain consensus and really get to know the client. We moved into a strategy and discovery phase where we learned to measure the site and then we moved into a design phase where we might have needed a little bit of sugar to help the project go down but we were able to get through that with our crafty and diplomatic project management. Now we're ready to move into the next phase of our project which is the development phase we're going to build the dang thing. Allison has now started to work with our team to make sure that we're able to start setting up all the development processes and to make sure that we're able to start voting for. And this is really where our lead engineer and the development team really get to start their stuff. At Palantir we like to work in an agile process where we set up two-week sprints. We determine about how much work we can get done in that amount of time. Work with a client to prioritize that work. Work through a two-week sprint where we find this really helps to make sure that we're not too far off track. We're not building anything they don't need or we're not showing something that's whack-a-do. And then making sure that we're able to fix if there's any issues. I always like to tell people you're only a sprint away from getting anything that needs to be fixed. Working in an agile frame really helps with that. During this time our team's going to be working on a couple of different things. They're levels of effort to different tickets. You might say this one's going to take about a half a day or a full day. I've worked on teams before that did this in t-shirt sizes where you're like this is extra small or this is a 3XLT. So it really depends on how you're able to figure out how much you're able to take on and really let your client know that in this period of time we think we're able to work on this much. Our team's going to be helping our client assess what can be done, what's the best priority order for them so we're not confusing Drupal or we're not putting a card before a horse. And we're really helping, like I said, to make sure that those dependencies are set. Our team's really going to be spending a lot of time creating the site. They're going to be building, they're going to be doing testing and deploying. Throughout this time our PM's going to be responsible for managing a pretty regular schedule where each day we're going to be meeting for about 15 minutes in a meeting called a scrum where each day we're discussing if there's any blockers and that really helps to make sure that nobody spins for too long without being able to get help or that nobody's running into any problems. At the beginning of each, or excuse me at the end of each one we're going to be doing a demo and a retro and then we also meet as a team where we go alright what are the things that we want to take on? Do we have tickets that really make sense? Do we have tickets that are actionable? And making sure that we're going to go forward? You know Joe, this job could be systematic. Yeah. Automatic. Yeah. Never bureaucratic. Yeah. And we're sprinting. We're sprinting. User stories are being finished one by one. We're sprinting, yes we're sprinting. Completed until work gets done. We're sprinting, yes we're sprinting. He's going to leave. We're sprinting. We're client during this time while we're singing and doing whatever that is. We'll be helping to set acceptance criteria. How do we know that this particular ticket is done? You want to make sure that that's documented early so that way you have an appropriate level of that program and when you're having conversations with the QA team, you're having conversations with anybody you know what your aim is for. We'll begin with the ending in mind. Sometimes it might be more important to have a certain type of page completed before another one and that's not something that's easy for us on the agency side to be doing. It's really something we want to make sure we're helping the client be able to provide what value there is. Many times our clients will be doing internal backups. We'll do one as a team and we might do a couple of follow-ups but there might be dozens and dozens of stakeholders and our client team might be really helping out with a lot of that. And in the best projects we find clients working in our daily meetings the more that they are interacting and they see what's going on in a project the better that we're all able to work together to make sure that things come together. But again we're going to run through another villain in this Randall offer. This time it's going to be scope creep. This is what's going to happen when our clients are going to practice a little bit too much into a project. And our PM and our lead developers really need to be on their toes to make sure to watch for this. They might need to go back to some of that documentation from the very beginning where we laid out a lot of things that were in and out. So how does Allison really work through this? Sometimes she might refer to the SOW. She might go back to some of the documentation that we had on the original strategy and really help to guide why something was not included or why something was down in a slightly different way. But sometimes unfortunately there's always that time when you just have to sometimes say I don't know, let it go? Bow the scope, bow the scope you can't let this creep anymore Bow the scope, bow the scope lack of funds you can't ignore I don't care what my fund At this point we've had a project for a decent amount of time right that contract in the very beginning was weeks, maybe months years earlier so the team's got to keep moving and Allison as a project manager that has to be that cheerleader helping drive everybody moving forward helping everything continue going on making sure that we're still communicating well we're still documenting what we need to have and that we're not putting up walkers and that she's able to help not move down to make sure the project keeps going forward but alas, it's bound to happen especially just before you're about ready to launch something it's definitely going to happen in a few years, it's bound to get sick it's going to be heartbreak and Allison's going to have to manage the project with fewer points and just my next expectation as soon as Kenny recovers we're finally ready for that whole best part of this whole thing and that's launch launch so thankfully after we battle all that scope creep we've gone through so many different phases since the very beginning of this thing and we're able to talk about this loud, proud and high above the pride I know, this isn't the end project manager still has one very, very important thing that she needs to take care of and that's making sure that we have this new retrospective effectively you want to make sure that as we're moving through each project as we're doing each increment on a project that we're regularly talking about ways that we can improve there's three basic questions that are great for a retro and this can be as a part of each individual sprint and definitely a must-do piece at the end of a project you want to ask what went well what are the things that in this project we're super proud of communication, whether that was the design process, strategy process Allison singing, whatever it happens to be we want to make sure that we document what went well we also want to talk about what could be improved my singing my dancing but we also want to make sure that we're able to talk about the things that didn't go quite as well in a project so we are able to fix those next time around and then also one of my favorites is what can we do to inform the next project what are the learnings that we have really cool technical implementation it might have been a really awesome project management thing that we did but making sure that we document all of those things as we have this meeting Allison's job in that is really making sure that she's jogging everyone's memories of what just happened you've done your job right and you've had everything come in right there's a good chance you might be able to have your client come back which is a really really great thing to be able to do managing your inside sales pipeline is easier than managing going out and getting new clients it's also kind of a sense of pride when you're able to have somebody who love working with you so much they keep wanting to work with you so the more that you're able to stay in touch the more that you're able to work into support we're able to do small updates the better off it's really going to be for your project but you really do have to keep in touch with your client it's never really good bye so we started with hello so we're going to end with hello it's me I was wondering if after all this time you'd like to meet to hire us again you have a Drupal 6 site it's always not supported hello come here and thanks for coming we do have to go to our Drupal our session page you can download our agenda risk law content audit you can also download the slides from here if you have any questions you have on those and we're here for a few more minutes so folks have any questions singing or you're the one who said let me get a refresher well she's prepping does anybody have any questions about project management I can't do the singing you heard that so as a PM how many projects are you managing generally I might have 2 to 3 presently I have 2 and then I work with other project managers to help on their projects I do about 2 to 3 our project managers also sometimes will be managing support clients they might have 1 to 2 larger active projects and then maybe 3 to 4 support clients that they're regularly working with what other cities are you touring this is our finale but we're on the internet as everything goes so one of the big project challenges that I've run into at a bunch of different organizations from the clients I'd rather come from the the rest of your organization that develop their scarce resources and very often somebody gets pulled off on another project or resource on a very hard time so do you have any advice for the shops out here or how to control their resources so that they don't mess up their own projects that's a sticky point resourceing is never fun but I mean the less disruptive you are your project the less onboarding you need to do to better offer your clients what I like to do is if I am going to lose resource on a project or with people the best thing you can do is just be as open and transparent as you can like hey we're losing Allison on this project for a couple of days our expected output for this next is going to reduce by this amount we can look at other ways to augment staffing maybe at a later sprint or we can extend the timeline that project management triangle time scope budget whichever one is adjustable often if somebody gets pulled off it's hard to be able to pull anybody on so it really just kind of becomes one of those conversations that you have to have in your project do we reduce our scope do we elongate our timeline or do we look to bring other resources in it's never a fun topic but that's the best way you can do it I found you don't work I have a bonus song since it's DrupalCon just in case we were going to open with it but we got scared to change it up this was going to be our opening oh oh oh look at this room here to consume some skills today oh oh oh I've got my props and my partner Joe I'm ready to go our hashtags are sweet and helpful when you tweet to tell DrupalCon that our fashion rocks and oh oh oh visit our booth so you can get some cool palette to your socks good morning