 I'll just go ahead and dive in. I have been project managing for a few years professionally to pay my bills. And then before then, just hobby projects or things I was interested in, like large-scale things, like getting an Amethyst Curie refile with the Supreme Court, so just small things. And I had to get a job, so I thought, this might be fun, project managing and work for us, that can't be that hard, right? So hopped into a couple different jobs and I was having fun with it. I was feeling pretty good about myself. Got a scope of work on a Monday afternoon. It was a little extensive. And the client wanted a quick turnaround kickoff call. So all right, open up base camp. It's my favorite tool. Throw some task in there, give some little, maybe some delegation going, a few key dates, and get the kickoff call scheduled. Hop on the phone and I'm like, this is actually going pretty well. This is not gonna be that bad. And then the client starts talking. And I barely got through our team introductions when she informed me how disappointed she was in my project management skills. She had reviewed base camp and it had of no value to her. She would not be using it. And I was to provide her with a full professional scale project management folder. I needed a Gantt chart. I needed to provide her with a list of resources, responsible parties with their contact information so that she could stay on top of their delegated task. But were the dependencies and where was the waterfall chart? I thought this, this has gotta be a joke. Like she's kidding, right? So this is a WordPress project. We don't manage our WordPress projects like that. We use base camp and we talk about every single task, ad nauseam, and then we finally do it. So I explained this is how we're going to project manage. We're gonna use base camps, a bit of a hybrid waterfall agile process where we will iterate all of our concepts and we will flesh this project out. She said, no, we're not gonna do that. I felt quite defeated. She asked me how I could possibly call myself a project manager. That project finally ended, thank God, but it was not fun. So after that phone call I decided maybe I should probably learn some things. So I called some friends who worked in larger companies of corporate America, Hewlett Packard and AMD. They did project and product management. And we talked about everything that led up to that phone call and then everything that kind of happened afterwards because it got worse. And they sort of laughed and said, wow, I should go into WordPress project management. That is easy. I was like, okay, so there are some differences in what we're doing with our, the way we manage projects. So who is a project manager? Who in the room is a project manager? Who identifies as a project manager working within the WordPress economy or any other community? Cool, that's cool. The funnest thing about working in WordPress is that you get to, as a project manager, you get to see a project go from a scope of work or an RFP all the way through delivery, which is really exciting. You get to have very hands on experience helping develop that. Your influence on the web is actually as important as the developers and the designers behind the projects. So who can go into project management? My slides are really awesome, so I'm sorry, I won't get to see the storyline that unfolds. But are you in web development and you're tired of it? Do you have a knack for organization? Are you a natural born leader? Can you meld a team and can you bring cohesion to a project? Do you find yourself delegating household tasks to your children all day long and making sure they're done on time? That's an excellent skill. So pretty much project management in WordPress is an open, I would say it's up for grabs. It is yours for the taking. However you manage your projects that can be applied into a WordPress scope, you can use Basecamp, Asana, Trello. I have a friend who manages in JIRA, I don't know how she does it, no thank you. But she's quite skilled at it. So if you're into that, the field is open. When would you need a project manager? The picture that goes along with that is of people running down the sidewalk, tearing up paper, and you wanna get a project manager into your process before you want to tear the scope up and run away and hide in a closet. So before the first kickoff call, it would benefit you to have somebody come in and help you streamline all those tasks and help you figure out what order you're going to do them in. And if you're running multiple projects at once, which many of us are, we don't just have one project we work on for four months. How do you set up a production schedule? How do you balance what this client needs on this date and this client needs on that date? And if you're in the code, writing your if-then scripts all day long, the last thing that you wanna do is hop into Gmail or whatever and go back and forth with a client over why you missed this deadline, that you told them you'd have this thing done by and you knew you couldn't, but you thought you were making them happy. Project managers smooth all that out. And clients love having a project manager to talk to, so that's also helpful. What was the other one? What does a project manager do? Well, we've kind of covered that, right? You streamline tasks, you delegate, you hold people accountable, but more than that, it's more than task management. It's team leadership and it's a servant leadership-based position. You have to be available to your developers to sit on the phone and say, no, actually that's not what that button is supposed to do when I click on it. No, actually that's not the page I want to go to. No, I don't want to click five times to find that blog post. You have to be able to walk them through that process. No, that's not what the client actually wanted when she said she wanted that. She doesn't really know what she's asking for. You have to be able to help them work through that process. And it's a huge blessing to a developer to be able to vent to, the project manager's in a safe place, they can't go back to the client. Is there, are you kidding me with these PSDs? No, no, we're not developing that. Well, actually we are, because they're paying us a lot of money so we're going to go ahead and develop that. Project managers also help keep scope on track. So recently we had a project come in that we're working on with the ladies at CodeRed Media and it was written in a bootstrap and one of the developers said, I want to rip the theme out. Cool, that's awesome. No, we're not going to do that because that's like 40 extra hours of work and they're not going to pay for that. Well, they should pay for that. I agree, they probably should pay for that. But we're not going to do that. And being able to go back to a developer and saying, are you blocked? Is this a roadblock? Is production completely blocked? Well, no, can you work around it? I guess, great, let's keep going. And it's also great to go back to the client and say, well, you've got a really bad theme, but of course you don't want to say it that horribly sounding, but, and we'd like to rip that theme out and build it from scratch, but that's going to cost you like 20 grand extra. I don't think the client is really going to appreciate that, you know, 50 hours into the project. So you want to kind of get those things squared away at the front or tell your developers, suck it up and deal with it. They don't like hearing it, but you got to say it. You also are the person that gets to tell the client, it's ready, go check your side out. And then you also have to be the one that says, oh, that's still broken, sorry, we're on it. We actually have a project task for that. So it's a lot of delegation and a lot of diplomacy. And if you can handle being yelled at and still look like you like your job, try and make a good project manager. If you get yelled at and you want to throw tomatoes back, you probably don't want to go into this still because you're going to get yelled at a lot or at least that face. Or told, you should not be a project manager. So thank you for the coming. That's my lightning talk. That's my information. I actually work full time at serverpress.com now and I still help the ladies at CodeBring with projects, but thank you for coming to work campus.