 All right guys, I couldn't decide how many of the slides for my 45 minute presentation to delete. So we're gonna start right on time and hope the coffee is really kicking in, okay? So coffee before clients, does everybody have enough coffee? Are we good? Cool. Quick show of hands, how many people have seen that look on their face of a stakeholder or a client or whatever? How many of you have gotten to wear that face yourself? I feel like I'm back at the Drupal Group photo. So really, this is what we're gonna be talking about today. When this happens, what do you do? But first, who am I and why am I talking about it? I tend to collect letters after my name. All of that stuff really means I love writing, so I love content strategy and because I want everyone to read what I write, I'm really into accessibility. And oh by the way, I'm a PM and I really like helping people be the muse and connect our amazing development teams with our amazing clients to produce something really cool. And where do I work with doing all this cool stuff? I am at Tandem. We are basically the agency half of those Lando guys. So if you know who Lando is, most of, well, I'm getting, wow, most people are like, yeah, okay. So anyway, we're an agency, we help people build really cool things and that's us and I'm talking really quickly. So they've asked us to put these awesome things in here because none of us would be here if we didn't have people contributing to our community. So there's options on Friday. Pick one, get involved if you're around. It would be cool to see you okay. Now I'm gonna try to slow down a little bit. Today we're gonna be talking about how we're gonna herd people together, get them on the right path, handle difficult situations and difficult conversations, get everyone playing together, working together, going to the right places and just basically taking something that maybe didn't go to plan and making it a little bit more to plan. So this is a really, really boring description of a project but essentially I wanted to emphasize that a project is not your website or your digital thing, experience. Your project is the process you're doing to get that result and it's a bunch of wonderful people coming together to produce that result. And sometimes things go to plan. Estimates, oh you're coming in under estimate, everything is on time, you are below budget, everyone is super happy and that is really not at all what we're gonna talk about today. We're talking about it when things go bad, when things get stressful and nobody's happy. I mean I mentioned here stakeholders aren't happy but really who are we kidding? We all want to do a great job. We all want to produce beautiful, wonderful things that we can be proud of and sometimes it just doesn't go to plan but it doesn't matter. The projects as end results don't always have to be perfect. The process isn't always going to be perfect but if you have dedicated, awesome, wonderful, engaged people all working together and communicating effectively, that's what's gonna make it work. So just like in any project you can't define success without a KPI, right? Well you can't define success in terms of your communication and your decision making without deciding who does what rules. You need to know who your account manager, your product owner is, who your PEM or your scrum master is. You have to understand who of your stakeholders has the final decision and who influences them and how. And all of this comes back to, yeah you're gonna hear me say this a lot, communication. It comes down to having open, honest, direct communication. This is where I get on my little soapbox for a second. Things like the compliment sandwich is not an open, honest, direct communication. Think of all of your happy thoughts as this beautiful bit of cotton candy and you're happy and you're like 12 and it's exciting and wonderful. And then the other one's a sea urchin. Would you, I didn't sell my hands to a sea urchin. You kind of pick it up gingerly and you study it and you learn from it and it's wonderful. But you don't actually wanna snuggle it up with it. When you have something like the compliment sandwich, you're wrapping a sea urchin in cotton candy and handing it to somebody. Okay, the whole Pavlov dog bell every time you do that, well people are gonna start running away from the cotton candy and not just because we hit 40. Seriously, you need direct communication. You need to have this relationship so you can build trust because that is the glue that pulls it all together. The project, this process that you're working through to get that end goal, it is built on trust in communication. And without that trust, you won't have a common vocabulary. Everything breaks down there and it really won't matter how amazingly talented everybody is if you can't rely on each other and know that when Jane says this works, I believe you, or if someone says that I don't understand, they feel comfortable coming to you. So part of this whole transparency thing isn't only the vocab we use, but it's also knowing how to speak to somebody. It's about what method, who it is and when you talk to them. I was telling somebody a story the other day. My husband's an incredible introvert and he goes to all these conferences himself where it's a lot of socialization which if any of these introverts in the room you are kind of cringing a little inside probably a lot this week. So when he comes home from conferences, I'll say hi, but I don't go over and like engage him and tell him about things. I let him breathe a little and then he comes to me and then we have a nice conversation and learn about his day or whatever happened. The same idea with people. Sometimes you need to give somebody the opportunity to come to you. If maybe if your development team needs to come to you with things, you need to make sure that that doorways open. You need to know, let them know, hey, I'm gonna need something from you. Let me know when you're ready. Maybe it's a client working things out that way. It's just a matter of knowing who you need to talk to and how you need to talk to them. We're all individuals. How we communicate with each other is individualized. And then we need to define success. Now I may say the goal of your, their project is the process. Your goal is the end result to your website or whatever, but success isn't a launch date. Success is, hey, I got more conversions. Hey, I got people aware of this great new thing we're doing. Hey, I have people, I have my end users engaged in a way I never have before. That is success. And when you don't have those clear goals, those definitions of success in the long run, you're never going to be able to be successful because everyone will be like, oh no. Now I said when projects go bad, why am I babbling about this? Because this is the groundwork you need because if something goes bad, you need to reference this. Okay, this is not me just going on off on huge tangents here. If you do not understand at the end why you wanted it. I wanted to get a percentage increase in conversions within six months based on my analytics events or something. When the project starts getting hairy, when things start going where people are expressing stress, you need to be able to reference this. You need to be able to go back to these success marks that those end goals, I said the goal is the project, but you know, I mean the website, but those end results that you're looking for and reference those to help bring you back. Because when you're looking at your long-term goals, you can help put in perspective what you really need right now. All right, now. Sorry, I couldn't resist a super, super stomach. You have to have all of this framework involved and this can be done right from your kickoff meeting. This can go start pre-sales. You can start this communication, this understanding, this openness that brings together this big picture and this shorter, smaller-term goals. So that way if things go wrong, well, you can be a little flexible. You can see where you're going and find a pivot, find a different way there, find a different route. What you do, you analyze where you are, you figure out what you need to do to adapt to get there and then you make a new plan, you improvise, you improve upon your process to get to where you're going. All right, so obviously by the picture I started off with, people get stressed, people get angry, they get a little horrified. This isn't what I thought it was gonna be and usually everyone's reaction is oh my God everyone stands back. We don't wanna deal with that sea urchin. The sea urchin's kind of exploding all over the place, it's nasty, nobody wants to deal with that, right? Hearing that is awesome. Sometimes it's just letting them vent and sometimes you've just gotta put on that, that okay, let's get this out in the air but you listen to all of it. You listen to it because it's good because as soon as they stop talking to you, they're talking to someone else. Hear it, listen to it, embrace the fact that someone is really ticked off because that is your way to learn where you're going next to stop it. It's just a healthy part of this overall process. So as I started saying, you hear them out, where's this information even coming from? Is this, hi my CTO was in his car in rural New Hampshire and he couldn't get to our website. Okay, I live in rural New Hampshire, that's actually not a big thing, that's just a snowy day, sorry. It happens, but is this, my CTO was looking at our analytics from this company we pay a great deal of money to to analyze our analytics and our speed is down, this is causing down, our SEO is down and overall conversions are looking terrible. What are we going to do about it? Okay, that's information you can work with. So when you have that, okay, reference back what does success look like? Chances are if you've done all that framework, I was babbling about a second ago, you already have an idea and you can open that communication pathway. You can say what is important to you or better yet you can be empathetic. I know you're under a lot of stress, I know you need to report to your stakeholders and your team, how can we get you there together? Hearing it is good, understanding it is better. And I kind of already talked through most of the slide. So basically, you have to understand why they're hissing at you. And a lot of people want to be defensive, not my team, you want to be, no, my stuff is right. That doesn't do anything, who cares? Nobody cares who's right, it's like when your kids are arguing, nobody cares who got it first. Nobody, someone so took something, nobody cares. What matters is how you're going to fix it. So understanding it helps. And it might just be they have a meeting with their stakeholders at 4 p.m. and they have no idea how to tell them that this is a good thing. All they're hearing is the negative from their team. And they're freaking out. We've all felt that pressure, maybe not in that kind of situation, but we've all felt that pressure before. There have been days when we have this one client, she came to us really upset with something with something similar and I explained where we were. She's like, I didn't know that. I ended up putting together a dummy slide for her, for her presentation that later that day. She had to go through and brand it, make it pretty, but I put all the information in a slide and I sent her a slide. She looked good, we looked good. Everyone was happy. It was took what, 20 minutes of my life to take this hiss and turn it into her showing success as the stakeholders who are helping paying the bills. Listen to the hiss, embrace the hiss, make sure they're comfortable. Frankly, not maybe not be a jerk to you, but make sure they're comfortable and make sure we say openly communicating enthusiastically because as long as they're able to do that, you can turn it around. So sometimes it's awesome. Sometimes we need to embrace the hiss, we need to take that sea urchin and yeah, we're gonna cuddle it gingerly but we need to just take it and really just be grateful that we have it. So it comes down to playing well together and how do we build it so that they can feel comfortable coming to you rather enthusiastically. Exactly what I need more coffee. Well you have to think of who the team is. When we think about our team, well a lot of people here are wearing shirts of their companies because those are your team. But that's not your project team. Your project team includes your clients. Your project team includes the people who influence them if they're involved in daily activities. If they have a developer on their team that interacts with you, they're on your team. And you can't sit around and think oh my god, I have to play the blame game because this person didn't do it. No, this is a team member of mine. What do I have to do to help you get over this hurdle? It may not always be the easiest thing to do especially depending on the client's company culture. But it's up to us as the team leaders, as the team manager, I don't know what, none of the words seem to work because leader makes it sound like ooh we're leaders but no, we're all part of the same thing and that's the point. But to be, not the leader but a leader on your team, you need to acknowledge that these other people are working with you. And without them, it won't matter. That's really what this is gonna come down to. A friend of mine once said the TLDR of my entire thing is empathy and he started screaming and not maybe not screaming but being enthusiastic. But it really is, you have to embrace your clients, your stakeholders, even when they're angry, embrace them, pull them into your team because only together can we keep growing. So be transparent with them. A lot of people wanna spin things so it sounds great to their clients. When something is going wrong, if you try to spin it, they're going to know it's their company, it's their brand, it's their product. They're going to know. Just be transparent. One of my favorite clients, she comes in sometimes and we're like, so that didn't go well. What are we gonna do? And we sit down and she and I have these one-on-ones twice a week of going, do we have anything we need to talk about? And sometimes she picks up our corgi and puts it in the microphone and you know, other days it's we actually sit down going through GitHub tickets going, okay. Well, yeah, let's look at that one. I have no idea what you're saying. And we work through it. And when I mentioned the corgi, yeah, get to know the person. If I were having to call up Miss PM person that this didn't go well with, that wouldn't go well. But if I were to call up that particular woman I was mentioning with the corgi, we would talk it out. And then she'd text me a picture of her pizza socks and I'd send her a picture of my hedgehog socks and saying, well, we'll conquer the world in fuzzy socks because that's what we do. And I really have had the corgi held up to the camera for me. He was very confused. But the point is we brought work as a team and on each of our project teams we work with the client as a team member. They're vital. They're not there just because they're a client, they're paying. They're there because they're working with you to reach their goals. And in the end, if we're working with them, if we're building something for them, there are goals too. Oh yeah, basically a whole bunch of other people. There's a bunch of quotes online. But the point is you have to work together. You have to not genuinely consider them a part of your team. But sometimes you have multiple stakeholders on a project and sometimes maybe their priorities are not exactly in line. Maybe that somebody is really, really focused having to report to one department where there's another department and they're all coming to you with the top 10 priority items which of course are not at all the same. What do we do? You get everybody in the room. I work virtually so it's in the hangout together. One time we had a client who with their teams were getting a little fragmented like that. We did an all-stop and I set up a retrospective board and I allowed anonymous posts and their team and our team put everything in that retrospective board. And from there we changed the way we communicated. We sat down, we spent two hours talking through this retrospective board in the middle of a project because we didn't want it to become a post-mortem. We stopped, we pivoted because they needed to get aligned so that we could empower them. When you're setting it together, when you're getting everybody in the room sort of speak, you can achieve some really amazing things. But then again, maybe they're really, they're pretty far gone. They're up on the ceiling, they're really stressed out. To my team sometimes they see me up on the ceiling really stressed out too. It happens. It's not gonna help anybody. You've got to bring them down and to do that you have to understand why they're up there. They have a job outside of communicating with you. They have a life outside of communicating with you. You have a life outside of them. They have one outside of you. The clips and the sound bites we get from our clients is a tiny piece of this huge picture. So that comes back from knowing them as a person. Hey, you're sounding stressed, everything cool? Well, I have these three reports with two different department heads. I have X, I have Y, I have all disease and I just, okay, great. What pieces can we help with? What pieces, because I, as your team member, not as your vendor, but as your team member, what pieces can I take off your plate? Sometimes just saying it helps. Sometimes it just reopens that doorway of communication there. Sometimes there's stuff I can actually do to help. I mentioned the slide. There's one thing that we were having a problem or breakdown in communication when we were talking about a user journey. We had six people on the phone and three different definitions of what the words were meaning. I have some really ugly slides I keep in my scrap box. It's of a little stick figure on a dotted line to a bright orange box, to a dotted line to another bright orange box, mapping out the user journey in about three steps. I do those a lot. Why? Because it takes me five minutes to put this hideously ugly thing together, but everybody knows exactly what we're talking about and you get people going, oh, that's not what I was saying. I meant this. Well, that's not really what the rest of us heard, but okay, and we work it out. By understanding what's causing their stress, if it's communication, if it's outside resources, whatever it is, by letting them talk to you, by keeping that open, they're going to come off that ceiling a lot faster. Now, what if your team was wrong? Like your development team, not the team, but your development team. What if there was something that actually got screwed up? Nobody wants ever, that never happens, right? Every project you ever worked on was perfect? Yeah, so let's pretend we've got to own that and it sucks. That's what I'm supposed to say about them. Too late. It's a really unpleasant thing to say, yeah. But you know what? It doesn't turn into a blame game there either. After further research, this technology did not go the way we thought it was going to go. Maybe this module didn't work how we thought. Maybe it just wasn't producing the user journey we thought it would. There's something happened. We miscalculated how long it would take us. Things happen. This is real life, it happens. You don't point fingers, you don't get, you don't, again, you don't get defensive, you don't sit around, you know. You just keep going with it. You have to identify what that problem, just the same as before, identify what it is that you're trying to accomplish, where the breakdown is, and what improvisations you have to do. And then you propose a timeline to fix it. Now, let me make something really clear. When we screw up, because we will at some point, everybody does, or shall we say, sorry, misestimate or a guesstimate where we're going with something. When something doesn't go right that we have to take accountability for, that happens. When you propose a timeline to fix it, do not be late. Nobody wants to keep going back over and over again. Build yourself padding, build yourself anything. Just make sure it's in there. You don't want to have the same conversation again. And then of course there's those times where you did exactly right. Everything was perfect and they're still not happy. Oh my God. Well, people are getting tired looking at it. Find the common ground. Find out where the expectation didn't meet reality and prioritize things and more importantly, deprioritize other things. This community draws a lot of people pleasers. We'll do one more thing. It's not gonna, it's only gonna be one more hour. It's fine, it's fine. We can do that, it's fine, it's fine. We all see the little dog with the burning. It's fine. No, you can't do it. You have a life. I don't care if you're Netflixing and chilling with your dog, you have a life. Deprioritize something else and work with them as a team member to do so. So, real quick, I know we're low on time here but we're gonna keep going. When things go wrong, here's the don'ts. Don't blame, don't get defensive. Think about any child fighting over a ball you've ever heard. Do you really care who grabbed it first? Have you ever in your life cared? No, nobody does. Don't forget to show you value of what you've done to date. God, we're all these amazing professionals in this room. Our teams are amazing people with great skill, great talents, they're awesome. Show what they did. Don't focus on what didn't go wrong. You have value in what you've already done. Consider it an opportunity for the next step. I don't like scope creep on a ticket but I actually love it in a project because that's phase two, phase three. Hey, let's face a court contract. Let's keep going. This is awesome. People are like scope creep. No, we want that. That's a long-term relationship. That's not creep on an individual issue. But in the long-term, in terms of the relationship and the project, that's a beautiful thing. Keep talking about that. Make sure they know that, yeah, you're stressed out now but I'm not going anywhere. Six months down the line, I'm still gonna be here to take care of you and work through this, so let's keep going. Make sure they see the value of the long-term relationship and to do that, you're going to need to define what those next steps are. You're going to need talking about the phase two, the phase three, what do we want to do in July? Right now, we're kind of hectic because we have this hectic stressful thing to deal with but let's deal with that one in July because that's a fantastic idea. And again, keep focusing on we as the team because you know what? There's always someplace cool to go. These, the web is evolving. That's half of the reason half of us are here because it's interesting and it changes and it keeps going more and more and growing and you have all these next steps to go. Nobody wants to be stagnant because you guys have got this. So, in case you're tired of cats. The Drupal Association has asked us to ask you guys to take this survey and let us all know what you think. There's a, I'll post the slides but there's also a link somewhere on the website too. Probably should have put a bit leading together but I just thought of that. So, that is all she wrote. Hey, in a minute and a half early, go Expresso. One and a half shots of Expresso left at Indra Gulf War. Were you here for a bunch of it? I'm sorry, I just came in toward the end but I know it's sorry.