 How are you guys doing? Day two, right? Maybe for some people, day three, I'll tell you three. Oh, I can't, you know. I can't. I appreciate the effort. 100%, but I don't know if I can do it. OK, grab the podium. There we are. So yeah, so it's day two or three. Getting close to the end of the day. How are you feeling? How's your energy? OK, oh, that's pretty good. You ready to rock? Yes. Are you as excited as that person right there? Is anyone? That's amazing. She's so happy or angry at that sandwich. It's hard to tell which. So thanks everybody for coming. Great to have you here. Today we're going to be talking about some aspects of project management, how to find the right size for a project, always a tricky thing. And specifically, we'll talk about some of our experiences and what we found to be the benefits of kind of putting project into the right size of box so that it can sort of move more quickly. Things can, it's easier to plan and roadmap our overall sort of project pipeline, all that kind of stuff. So this is us here. We actually literally have a crab hat somewhere, don't we? You have a crab hat, don't you? So this is us. My name is Bjorn Thompson. I work for Imagex along with many others, some of whom are here, hey Brent, how are you doing? And I work very happily alongside Gina, who is now putting on a crab hat. Thank you, Gina. Very cool. Hi, I'm Gina. Balheda, last name. Don't worry about it. I work at Trinity University. I'm the creative director there. I've got a couple of my teammates in the audience as well. And we first partnered with Imagex a couple of years ago to start taking on what we have come to call right-sized projects with our website. We underwent a complete website transformation about three years ago. We went from the Imagex content management system and migrated over to Drupal 7. We launched our first page in November 2013. Since then, we have kind of scaled back from having this gigantic massive redesign project to thinking about it in very consumable, very digestible. Do you like the theme? Chunks. So without further ado. Do we switch hats now? Do you put it on? Do you want? Yeah, I do. Okay. This is the talking hat. You're not allowed to talk. It's really small. Sorry, I didn't have the hat on yet. It's hard to get on. Okay, there we go, perfect. Okay. Right-izing hats is more challenging, obviously. So, yeah. Okay. So what we want to talk about is some of the benefits, hopefully, is it hard to take me seriously with this hat on? Some of the benefits, hopefully, of right-izing the project. So considering the scenario, you're going to a restaurant with a small group of friends. Do you choose a restaurant with broad scope like all you can eat? Everything's on the menu? A place that tries to be all things to all people? Or do you choose a restaurant with focus? At least it seems like a small sort of catered, well-executed menu. So there's pros and cons to every decision, whether you're going with something that, it makes everybody have, everybody has something for everyone, at least, or something where we have a really more targeted scope. So we have something for everything, for everyone. Everything's on the table. There's something kind of for everyone, maybe it's not exactly what you want. The quality can be highly variable, it's one of the cons. Some things may be done really well, maybe to switch over to the project metaphor. Maybe the content migration goes really well, but maybe the sort of design process is less, is executed less well. There's just more moving parts, harder to keep things, everything going at the same speed, at the same low quality. And also process can be less efficient. So there's waste and content, context switching as you're moving through the project. As we all know, especially if you have several projects on the go, context switching is a huge challenge. And even within a project, switching from being in the early stages of discovery to being into the definition and to delivery, there's so many different little parts to a thousand hour or five thousand hour project. It can be hard to keep it all in your head at the same time. So the catered, smaller, kind of well executed menu. Pros are the quality of results, reduced costs, hopefully, risk and waste, which we found that, and less context switching. Caught, of course, is you may not be able to get the exact dish you want, because maybe one part of that dish is delivered at a certain point. But then, to totally break the metaphor, you might just wait six months for the next dish, which probably doesn't happen in a restaurant. It happens in projects. Cool. So this is kind of our agenda for today, what we're gonna be talking about. So in terms of making the case, we're gonna talk about sort of the benefits of a smaller project, how to sort of, how to plan it out, how to roadmap it, how to keep focused, thinking about ways you can sell it internally, and different ways you can sort of frame the project to get the most benefit from it. And then finally we'll walk through a project recipe, which is a case study, and that's where our tortured metaphor we finally let go of it. But we love metaphors, as you can tell, and hats. And hats. So in terms of just sort of framing what are the benefits of right sizing or small sizing projects? Smaller can be better for many, many reasons. You can get going a lot faster, reduce bottlenecks. It's easier often to get budget release. It can be easier sometimes to plan projects that are smaller in scope over a longer period of time than a single big bank project. Smaller budgets often encourage prioritization and focus, but you can't do everything in 200 hours. So you have to think about what can I achieve? What's gonna create the maximum impact for that expenditure? And when people need to build something smaller more quickly, it's very beneficial to put a timeframe on it that's maybe a little compressed. They think differently. What can we live without? What is priority? And how do we best get huge impact from a relatively small expenditure? So some of you may be familiar with this quote, the biggest lie in software is phase two. We'll get there, right? We'll get to phase two. We'll do everything in phase two. It's gonna be amazing. So we try as much as possible. Of course, we've never experienced that, but if you have, this will speak to you, try to avoid sort of phase one, phase two. Instead of thinking about a series of planned activities, they're distinct projects that are sort of operating in some sort of sequence. Each with a specific business goal in mind. So we make a main project smaller by having individual roadmaps. Each individual roadmap rolls up and takes its own part in the large overall sort of institutional roadmap or organizational roadmap. Each one has a defined focus, as I mentioned, that contributes to the overall strategy where we're going in this organization and all that stuff. So here's just a really rough sort of roadmap of some of the things that we've worked on in collaboration with Trinity and with Jackson. And you don't even have to wear the hat. I'll let you speak to this one. Okay, okay. So when Trinity first started, like I mentioned, with ImageX, we had a website in place. It had some theme documents. It had a style guide associated with it. But we had phase twoed almost every extra feature that we could have imagined on our site, which actually alienated most of our audiences. And we ended up with a website that was mostly for marketing toward prospective students and left out alumni, our internal community, our faculty and staff, and our current students. So in order to kind of make phase two a reality, we realized that we really couldn't take on a gigantic web project again. There was a lot of headache. There was a lot that we felt a little bit tested by. There was a lot that we didn't get that we thought we would get or that we got, but was very subpar. I will definitely mention that that was before ImageX came along. So when we started in on the partnership, we started with two large projects. I'm calling them large because they were larger than some of the other projects we've done, but they were much, much smaller in scope and definitely smaller in budget than the overall web redesign project. With these projects, we focused on two of our key audiences. Current faculty and staff at Trinity and current students at Trinity. So that was a site templates project where we allowed faculty and staff to develop sites custom for themselves and our online course of study bulletin which communicates with our database of record colleague. We moved then into an online directory project which allowed us to again access our database of record and bring in all of the full-time and grant-supported faculty and staff at Trinity into an online directory profile system that was then shared across all of our microsites through the multi-site installation that we have at trinity.edu which is actually what our case study is about today. And then I mentioned our academics redesign. So this one is up next. It has a kind of project timeline of about a year right now and it will be our first step over the line into the D8 migration. So this is coming up next and it's something that we're really looking forward to. But again, it's just a tiny, tiny piece of the overarching Trinity website. Oh, you're fine. We're fine, thanks so much for that. Perfect, so that's a great framing for how we sort of plan projects, how we think about kind of incrementally adding value and making sort of the site, speak to everybody over time. So that's a really important aspect of it is how to plan it out. Because one of the challenges of course with like what we might call the mega project or the big bang project which I'm sure all of us, probably most of us have been involved in at some point. There's so many moving parts. A lot of processes going on simultaneously. A lot of time the thing that might lose out is sort of shaping the content appropriately or setting up a good system of content governance. All those different things kind of tend to lose out. So as much as we can sort of make the project a little smaller we can focus on doing a few things well. We can reduce overall risk by fully understanding and diving deeply into a few pieces of scope and really tackling those in full. So another aspect of this is right sizing projects also makes technology more accessible to stakeholders. If you want to involve someone from the beginning to the end, you wanna make sure they're comfortable following along. You have a couple of experiences with that. Maybe you could speak to that. So I think what we really are talking about here is oftentimes at Trinity especially when we're involving other offices and other departments across campus on our projects they are extremely highly respected and regarded experts in their fields. So we don't anticipate that a chemistry professor or a human resources expert is gonna know how to speak the language of the web they don't know our terminology they don't know our vocabulary but they know that things need to get done and they know because we've told them that we need their help to get there. So by taking these projects and really focusing them and making them all about our audience and making them about our key stakeholders we've really allowed them to speak to us in their language and we've tailored our language to speak back to them to really get that project to mesh together. That's a good way to think of it. And I guess like all of this is about tying into the sort of overall site project vision. So in this specific case we might sort of really focus on the students or really focus on the mission to get that piece right and really kind of dive down into that piece. Yep, yep. Is it harder to take me seriously? No, I love it. You like it. Yeah, I'm mad. Thank you, excellent. So something we kind of alluded to a little bit but sort of wanted to talk a little more about is smaller projects can kind of be toppings to enhance the main project or site to kind of continually feel this feeling that the site is growing that we didn't just stop when we released that's continuing to add value and getting bigger and better, getting better all the time. So a lot of different ways we can do that. We can extend the site to address a specific challenge and maybe that challenge we don't know about when we first release the site. Maybe that challenge doesn't really come up until six months later. So we are able to sort of, if we roadmap it over time, address that challenge that may not even exist at the beginning of the project. We can give attention to a specific group so we can really make sure we get that alumni section right or really make sure we get that admission section right and we can test or at least a new workflow. So it's a way you can sort of experiment and try new things with a little bit less of a risk profile, a little bit less going on at the same time. It also allows for targeting marketing on the new feature. So if you're working on something where you're building out great functionality for alumni or great functionality for students, current students, it lets you think about how am I gonna communicate this value to them? And you can start thinking about targeting that rollout to that group, how you're going to sort of gauge them, how you can get buy-in from them, how you're gonna communicate the results. It has a lot of benefits in terms of bringing people on board, getting them excited and making them feel like they're part of the process. And of course, with every project, it's easier to have satisfaction if you have those little wins, those little sort of Reese's pieces that you as the Elliot in E.T. follow. Another torture sort of metaphor. And it's easier to have satisfaction if you achieve those little wins with your stakeholders. If they're kind of on board and coming along with you, your clients and your user community. Because I mean, I think we all know about projects. People lose motivation over time. Everyone's excited at the beginning. But that doesn't always last. And faster wins, kind of keep people going. Keep that carrot in front of them. Wow, that sounds like a terrible way for people to roll. If there's a carrot in front of you, you're not very happy, are you? It's a pastry that's in front of you. So faster wins build excitement and help you maintain momentum. A crab cake, that's a great one. So with that in mind, I think I'm actually bestowing the hat to you at this point, do you know? There you are. My own crab hat. I'm gonna take us through what we are gonna maybe call our recipe for success for our online case study. So again, so Trinity's, I think most recently completed and very visible, highly successful project that we did with Imagex is our online directory. If you wanna visit it while you're there on your phones, it's at inside.trinity.edu slash directory. Stretch. Yeah, everybody, do it. Okay, all right, get the blood pumping because this is gonna be exciting. Okay. So one of the things that we found when we tackled this project was that it was gonna be much easier for us in a small chunk to really start over a very broad project of incorporating and including all of the content and design that we needed for this one specific project. We were able to really focus and tailor our wire frames. We were able to focus and tailor our Photoshop documents and mockups that would then become additions to our theme on the website. We also picked this project and prioritized this project because we knew it was something that was really important to our community and because it was really important to our community, we had more people willing to contribute the time, the energy, and the content, content, content for this project. Because they were willing to contribute, they were also willing to make it more accurate, they were willing to meet our deadlines and they were willing to help us figure out when that content was wrong, what we could do and how they could help us fix it. Again, we were able to think through every phase of the project through wireframing to the live production and testing. I should put testing first before production and we were able to involve our stakeholders from beginning to end on that when it was necessary. Otherwise, they would have had been just kind of a little afterthought of, oh yeah, we need to test the directory or oh yeah, we need to get HR or ITS involved to test the functionality here. So we were able to involve them in every step along the way. The end result was an online directory that is responsive, has a really robust search function and my favorite part has a really cool custom designed API that feeds across all of our subdomains. This was actually a make it or break it deal for us in terms of the directory because Trinity has 12 subdomains across which it feeds directory information. So we were able to take the directory which lives on inside.trinity.edu and feed it out and feed the information out, the styles, the content, the features. And we were able to feed that across to our website, sorry, our radio station, krtu.trinity.edu, our conferences office, conferences.trinity.edu and we were able to share that information very seamlessly through this API. So how did we get there? Well, it started with a project schedule and since everyone has 2010 vision, I wanted to point out on this project schedule that this actually includes team members from ImageX and from Trinity. So at no point were we working separately to try to achieve our goals, we were dependent on each other and we relied on each other in order to make all the small goals that were associated with this project. In the back end, what that meant was that Trinity had to hold accountable all of the offices and departments that were a part of this directory project, particularly human resources and ITS. But because they were invested in the project and they felt like the project was part theirs, or mostly theirs really, they were able to give us that content and give us that feedback, sometimes even before we requested it, which is like, whoa. We rarely had to go back and say, hey, we're waiting on this or hey, we need more information from you. So we completed before our scheduled deadline way to go. I think we were scheduled to release in the last week of December, but we released in the second to last week of December. So we all had a merry Christmas. So we gathered requirements as a part of the project process, of course. We did this together via Skype, which is always fun. We use Google Docs a lot and comments and shares and things like that. Again, these requirements were put forth by Trinity with the suggestions coming in from HR and ITS. But in the process, Imagex kind of came in and said, hey, I get this requirement, but have you thought about this? Or hey, I understand that you want this to be a feature, but maybe we can rethink about it or look at it in another way. Because of this ongoing feedback, we were able to take it back almost immediately to the offices we were working with and say, hey, is this a good idea? Are y'all on board? If so, we're gonna give it a check mark and we're gonna move on. And it happened very quickly, usually within the same day. And at a university, that's a big accomplishment. So we actually built out some of our original sketches with the help of the offices that we were involved with and configured things to have priority or predominance the way that they would want them to on the site. We also traded some things off when we thought a function wasn't actually going to be something that our users or our administrators would use. One example is we thought that it would be a really good idea to have a super filtered, detailed search. And you were gonna be able to check that you wanted to search by department or search by program or search by phone number or all these things. Turns out, nobody was actually using the directory which was in paper before then that way. They were using it to find generalizations or they didn't know what they were searching for, but they wanted to understand who was in a department, who was in an office, et cetera. So we made a trade-off and we actually kind of took this out of the scope and inserted another department's filter into the scope and it didn't change the cost of the project, it didn't change the timeline of the project and it actually worked better for all stakeholders involved. I think had the project been a lot bigger, it would have been something we would have either looked over or just had to run right through because we didn't have enough time to sit down and think about how we might actually solve the problems that the offices were bringing forth to us. Of course, we did a lot of content planning and I will emphasize that we couldn't have done this without the input of the other offices and kind of humbling ourselves to understanding what their needs were. We took a backseat on the content planning at first while they told us exactly what they wanted to see. We then stepped in with our expertise to help them get it there. We also did testing. We actually tested based on our content plan. Instead of just testing based on functionality, we wanted to make sure that the business objectives were met while we tested. So just a simple closed or open yes or no wasn't gonna work for us. We had to prioritize our testing in terms of whether or not this was gonna work for our clients. Really helped out a lot. They were able to help us prioritize. They were able to help us get it to the right place. I wanted to show a couple of screenshots. So everything tested, yay. And we have an online directory now which I hope you're all playing with. So here's the main page. This is what we call the directory. It has a search function. It also has that departments tab that I mentioned where you can go search through a department to find all the people located there. Each individual that is a part of the directory has their own directory page based on their username. This is a content type. And so the content type's permanent URL is based on their username as a unique entity. So poor Vicky with a last name like Erin's, she's the example on all of our things that we do. But so this is an example of Vicky's profile as a pretty distinguished professor. She has a lot of information stored in her profile. Part of the communication with our database of record colleague. Colleague writes a script via a program called Informer which some of you might be familiar with. And that script generates a CSV file. The CSV file is then uploaded to the website once a day and changes are checked whether there is an existing entity with changes. Those changes will be made and updated. If the entity no longer exists, that profile will be unpublished. And if the entity does not exist, then there will be a new profile made. Some of these features are locked down so that you can't go in and change your job title. If you just wanna decide to be director one day, like you can't just go in and change that. And then other things like your bio or your publications or your subject areas that you teach are things that you or your content editor for your department can fill out. So I mentioned the API. This is one of the ways that we're feeding information across to our different subdomains. So this is our main marketing site, new.trinity.edu. This is the English department page. So you'll notice Vicki up there to the, right? Thanks. So she's listed second actually because Claudia is the chair of the department. So that actually lists her first. We have a couple of functionalities like that built in. And so this is taking the information that's on inside trinity and pushing it out to new.trinity. Similarly, this is taking information from inside.trinity but filtering it to a different section within inside trinity. The academic affairs meet the staff page as well as krtu.trinity, our radio station, like I mentioned. So this is our online directory and it's a huge project. It involved a lot of stakeholders. It involved a lot of security. It involved a lot of personal investment. People wanting to know that they as humans had updated correct proper information available online. Each profile can be customized as much or as little as that profile member chooses. And each profile can be added or subtracted from its office or department at will. So overall, we weren't just working on a project. We were working on a project full of lots of people. And so we really wanted to do everything that we could to give those people the attention that they truly deserved. So it took a lot of planning. It took a lot of attention to budget. And then of course, it took a lot of buy-in. So I'll turn it back over to Bjorn to talk about those things. Great stuff. So obviously when you're thinking about a project model or whether you want to create a small project or a large project, or if you're aiming to kind of. If you're aiming to. Kind of potentially introduce some changes to your organization and how you think about projects, how you plan projects. These things are really important. You got to pay attention to fundamental planning, budgeting, and buy-in. So one of the really important aspects of that is understanding available resources. And that can extend in multiple directions. If you want to work with the registrar, if you want to work with the planning committee, it's really helpful if you know when their busy times are. What's a good time for them to have this project? When you know that, it shows a sense of forethought that you've kind of thought through, what is it like for this person to experience this project? How can we make this as easy as possible for them? How can we make sure we get the attention that we need for the project? If there's a vendor or internal IT required, it's actually helpful and good to understand and empathize with their schedule. What's a good time for that external team to help with this? Is there a certain time in the schedule that we can make this work together? And the more we understand the overall roadmap, we can actually slot those times in a lot better. Also, the very important piece, understanding the budget. So one of the challenges when you're aiming to kind of right size or atomize projects is okay, how much, how do we sort of plan for the year? How do we plan for the next two years? What does budgeting look like? So in terms of budgeting, obviously a lot of times when we're thinking about a project that might be happening six months from now or a year from now, we may not have a sort of a deeply granular sense of how that budget is gonna look. So we think of those further out projects like the DA project you talked about as sort of t-shirt sizes, sort of estimating as an epic. So we have a high level estimate on the overall roadmap and then we get really, really deep and think clearly about okay, what are we gonna estimate and how can we sort of get really, really granular with stories and tasks on the project that's in focus right now in front of us. Wait, won't this cost more? But wait. Won't this cost more? Are you ready? Oh, am I looking for it? No problem. I think this is the perfect plan. This is a question that we got asked by our administration. Won't this cost more? Won't doing it all together wrap everything up? You won't have to reserve the available resources for the vendor multiple times. You won't have to start and stop projects multiple times. How are you gonna actually budget this where it makes sense? And how are you going to sell that to our campus community? Whose budget conscious we'll call them? So how we did this was we actually helped to break down the original Giant Scope web redesign project and found out that this is like a ton as like a metric unit of line items that we could actually go down and look and see what didn't get completed. Unfortunately, it was about a third of the project. Because of that, because we had to buy, I mean, we've all been there, right? Okay, we can't fit that in the scope, but we need to move on. We can't fit that in the scope, but we need to move on. All these tiny things added up and actually gave us a less than desirable experience, especially on the administrative side for some of the scope that we requested from that original project. So because of this, we advocated for these incremental costs that are way more compact and thus more controlled and in a more controllable environment. So we didn't have to worry about crossing out these tiny line items as much as we had to worry about delivering this package that would make the website more enhanced and have extra features. In addition, by advocating for a smaller budget year over year, we're able to adjust our priorities as needed. I showed an example of a roadmap earlier that we went through. Turns out we had budget for the course of study bulletin project and the site templates at the same time, but we only knew we were gonna have that for one year. However, we got to split that budget in half and we got to carry that fourth year over year. Now we're not gonna extend a project out for three years. It would be uncomfortable. It would be frustrating and it would probably actually never get done. So instead we take these little budgets that we have and we're able to fit something really nicely into them so that we can continue to request those funds year over year and we can continue to reprioritize what those funds need to be allocated for year over year. We also heard a lot. What about my part of the project? This happens, right? If you focus on one audience, you don't focus on the rest, which could potentially be seen as a downside to some of your very important stakeholders or the people that you need to buy into the project. So we were able to expand our roadmap out and say, look, we're adjusting faculty and staff right now, but we're going to be able to address current students shortly in the future. The reason that we've prioritized it this way is because we feel that the technology will be advanced enough to give us a very robust and a very creative project without which we couldn't fulfill your needs instantly or immediately or within the same timeframe. It often helps for people to hear that you'll be able to spend more money on them if they wait six months. So we were open and honest about our roadmap. We showed people where they were on the roadmap in terms of timeline, and we showed them where they were in terms of resources and budget. This often helped us say, you know what, you have a really good chunk of time between September and December where your office can dedicate a lot of energy and effort to this project, so we want to help you be there right along the way. This will give us the most successful project. Again, we were able to be agile in shifting our priorities and move those chunks of projects around as we saw best fit other people's schedules, other people's timelines, and other people's energy levels. So speaking of buy-in, one of the things that our office has adopted is we always release to the internal campus community a press release or some sort of write-up whenever we release a new feature on the website. We share this via social media, we share it on our internal communication and email channels, and we get people to link to it whenever they're talking about it in terms of trying to bring it outside of the campus community. So this is just an example from a press release from our new center, but we're able to hone our marketing in on this one project and talk about all of the really cool benefits and features of this one project, which makes it look really cool when you see four or five of those releasing out in the same year, like, wow, Trinity's website is getting really awesome and they're adding all these cool features. Little do they know. It's a secret part of our ongoing roadmap where we're shifting our priorities with our budget. Okay. If y'all have ever been in a session with Bjorn and I before, you know that we love group projects. It's so fun. Everyone loved group projects in school, I'm sure. You were always the people who had teammates who did just as much work as you did. So we wanted to actually see if y'all would feel comfortable kind of talking amongst yourselves, find four friends, or make four new ones to see if we could talk about this a little bit so that this has some real world application to the things that you're working on right now. So because we're doing a new project, one of the many things that could happen is bedroom. So we're gonna actually divide people into, it's actually, we know what your teammates are, so we're gonna have to go and find them and kind of start with that. So we're gonna start with support. Why don't we say these four here? Yeah, these four are here, yeah. These four are here. Are you ready? These four are here. I don't know what we're doing. Here's four, here's four. These guys here, you know what we're doing. Over there? There's three. I don't know what we're doing. Who are we? Who's over here? I don't know. What? Here's four. Here's four. Oh, I can't believe we're leaving it all behind. I don't even know what we're doing.四, five, four, three, two, one. Lay down here. Where are the guys? They'reTech.com. There's four in this one. Here's four in this one. There's three. All right. I think it's still there. Teams, let's use our inside voices to be respectful of the rooms next door, please. Hi, sorry, really, sorry, just really quick, I know you're having a group discussion and I'm so excited about it, but next door they're having like a very intimate sort of like one person speaks and it's like bearing their soul and we can hear your whole conversation so if you can just kind of use your inside voices I would really appreciate it, thank you. I think we'll chat for about three more minutes. So we'll wrap up in about two minutes and we'll give a couple groups a chance at feedback so feel free to if you have a few sort of conclusions to come come back with that'd be great. Hello for those of you who are actually in here. So we're going to wrap up in about 15 seconds so I'll give you a chance to just finish off your thought and then we'll come back to the main group. Right, wow that was loud, hello, that was terrible. So we'll stop there with my interruption I apologize and we'd like to hear from just a couple groups just give us some thoughts on any discussion you had around a project that you could have broken up maybe into a smaller unit and some steps you might need to do to get that started. Now asking for volunteers can be challenging, but any volunteers, oh here we go, that'd be great. We won't make everyone talk. First of all I couldn't hear you because you weren't wearing the hat so I'm confused. I'm so sorry. I'll forgive you. So can everybody hear me now? Good. So I've only been in this position for about seven months and before that I didn't do anything web related for 15 years so bear with me, but I inherited a project at the end of its life cycle that ran nine months late on a six month time frame and about $90,000 short on what we got paid so it was super exciting. So one of the things I did a lot was look into this project and figure out what in the world is going on and will I actually have a job in three weeks or will we be out of business by then? We're still in business by the way. One of the things that was a problem with it is they had a D6 site that migrated to D7 and they had a user base that had a bunch of functionality they were used to and their user base was non-technical the same way that cavemen are non-technical. So they couldn't deal with change, buttons in different places, they were very confused. And the original site architecture was very convoluted and not very functional. So we tried to basically redesign the whole thing in one big swoop and say hey here it is, it's all better. The problem was we would make architectural changes that were intelligent and made things more stable but the button was three pixels too far to the left and nobody could figure it out anymore and they couldn't see the new functionality partway through so they would just freak out because the wire frames were weird. I think had we broken it into hey here's the feature like for instance here's your export feature that hasn't worked in three and a half years, it works now. Yes it looks a little different but watch what happens when I hit the button. Hey the website didn't crash, it's a miracle. But showing them that progress in something that they can really understand, particularly for the office who's like every time someone tries to export something we have to go call someone to restart the website or gives them an idea of the benefits to weigh against, it's a little different. You're gonna get some calls about people who are confused but there's a big bonus rather than what we did which was not efficient. For sure, thanks for sharing, that was great. Yeah it's a lot of similarities to a Kanban style where you're sort of deciding on your whip how many things you're gonna take in at the same time. Great, that was perfect. Thank you for sharing. Any other sort of brief thoughts? Would you mind horribly if I picked on somebody? I apologize for that. Thank you, we have a well-entold person, lovely. I have questions, but you know, in response to that, those, those, yeah, okay. Yeah, we'll definitely take some questions. If nobody else wants to share or, I hope y'all had fun talking to each other and learning about each other's projects and that you can take away some of the things that you shared with one another back to your home basis. I always told my kids that not to share hats with people, but I have a giant head too, so it doesn't fit so good. So the question that came out of our discussion is, let's say, and this might be the case with your project where, I don't know if it was a case where they came to you and said, hey, we want to change your whole university over to Drupal or we want to, and we want to redesign everything, right? So let's say it's a large-scale project and I love this concept of going in, okay, we're going to do this part of the project and we're going to do this part. Who's responsible to carry the vision for the whole redesign when you're doing it that way and think in terms of like design and, and messaging and, and if you're bringing in different people, how does that work? So I think it was really important for us to nail down those base themes and style guides and things like that first so that we had our own vision of what the website would continue to look like throughout the scope of the project, no matter how far it extended. I think it's very important to have somebody on board who can, is it, is going to be a very stable part of each team each time. One of the things we've really benefited from is that we use the same core developers from ImageX. When we ask for to start a new project, we request the same developer and we request the same project manager so that they're also on the same page as us and they are invested just as much in our brand and keeping our project moving forward as we are. So that's not always possible to have the same physical humans on the project the whole time, but if you can establish roles that have those kind of concepts and brand integrity in mind, I think you can hold accountable those roles for the scope of the project long-term. And were you able to treat the overall redesign as a distinct mini project? You know, we look at it like that now, I think, now that we're past it, right? I think we can consider the redesign project a mini project, though it wasn't mini. It was something we wish we would have broken down into smaller chunks over time. I think that learning from that experience really helped us create the type of environment that we all wanted to work in. And so that type of environment was one where we were able to focus our efforts and be very intentional about our efforts instead of looking at something really big and hoping that it gets to the finish line one day. Does that answer your question? Sure. Sure, great. You guys are awesome, by the way. It was very entertaining. I just want to say like kudos for you guys being such great partners. I mean, this is what we're going for all the time with our clients we work with. But there's often pushback from all kinds of people, including like sales people in my company, who are like, I don't want to sell a little tiny, I want to sell a giant project. How did you get such buy-in from your stakeholders and from your company? So I'm that person at ImageX. To be honest with you, it's such flawed logic. I mean, the partnership we have with Trinity, just from a business development perspective over the last three years, has generated a fairly significant amount of hours and revenue for the company. It didn't come all at once, but at the end of the year, you tally up your hours and you tally up where you're at. So it's a short-sighted mistaken approach in my perspective. This is one of the most valuable relationships we have. We do countless case studies, we do countless presentations. We wouldn't have any of that had we taken a short-sighted approach. Sure. So it's really set the model internally as well. I'd be lying if I said that we took this approach three or four years ago, we didn't. But now these types of small engagements, building trust, building value over time, building domain expertise, understanding the brand, these are core principles of how we do business now. Yeah. Is there any number you can put to it, like a percentage savings you think this got in the end over what it would have cost with overages? The project administration on small projects like this is significantly lower. I'm not a PM by any stretch of the imagination, but a significant percentage on the admin side alone. I'll actually add to what Brent said on that in terms of partnership. So I don't think Trinity would have come back to ImageX if we wouldn't have been successful in those first two projects. But now we look at them as a source of trust and we look at them as a source of education and I want to hit that really hard. Every time we work with them, we learn something. This builds up our confidence and it builds up our workforce and it builds up just in general our entire knowledge base between the two teams. I'm not speaking for them, but I've heard them say before that every time they work with us, they learn something else too. So I don't think we would have time to learn from one another if we had these giant projects that were nothing but stress. Again, kudos to both of you guys for figuring it out. Yeah, it's work in progress. Just real quick, I'll say on that, sorry to interrupt you, I have to ask a question. Is another aspect that might be a buy-in piece for sales or anyone who's kind of maybe potentially resistant, is knowing the pipeline of the partner that you work with and knowing where they're going and having a little bit of sense of predictability of their work is gold. Your part of their plan and your part of their plan definitely makes life a lot easier. Sorry, go ahead, cool. I was just curious as to what project management tools do you guys refer or use? So like a lot of shops, we use JIRA primarily for managing issues, bugs, stories, that kind of stuff. We use actually Google Docs a lot. Yeah, it's, you know, I know there's a lot of people who might look at that and say, well, you know, why isn't everything in JIRA? But it's sometimes very nice to be able to see everything in a single view, first of all. Also collaboration can be quite straightforward and quite effective, especially in Google Sheets is a great tool. Because first of all, especially at the beginning of a project, you need to understand, oh, maybe we're cutting into the next session. Are we? Okay, especially at the beginning of a project, you need to kind of understand what's the whole picture here. And when you start throwing everything in JIRA right away, it can be hard to understand the project as a whole, at least for me out of small brain. So those tools can really help sort of start that collaboration happen quickly, instead of having to go find that comment from that ticket. So that's a great tool. We also use Basecamp a lot. You know, some people knock it, some people don't. Compliance is great, we're moving more toward that. But Basecamp is something clients understand, they can use it, and it works really well for them. Did I answer your question? Great. Stop more than you can chew. That is our summary. Thanks for coming everyone, have a great conference.