 Thanks, Steve. Can you guys hear me OK? OK, I'm going to take two minutes at the beginning of this to talk about not what I came to talk about, because yesterday someone I really admired lost his battle with depression. And as someone who 10 years ago could not leave her house because I was so depressed, I've been struggling with it a little bit. And if anyone else here is, I wanted to take a minute and throw up just a few places that you can go for help. Because we talk a lot about the WordPress community. And we really do care about you here. So if you are struggling, there are places to go for help. The OSMI, Open Sourcing Mental Health, is a great organization. If you're a person who knows someone with a mental illness, if you're a company, they have great guides in there about mental health first aid. There's the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. There's Geek Mental Help, where every year people tell stories about how they've overcome their struggles in technology. And if you can't bring yourself to ask for help, there's a crisis text line where you just have to send a text. If you're struggling and you can, reach out to someone. If you're not and you see someone struggling, reach out to them. Like I said, we're a community. We're here to help each other. It's something I care very deeply about. And so I just, I've been shook a little bit. And I wasn't sure if anyone else was, and thought I'd share those. But what I'm actually here to talk to you about today is how you can increase your dexterity score with project management systems. There will be no dice, but there is a project management ninja and a dragon. And I'm clicking the wrong button. I do want a caveat so that we can avoid some questions at the end. This is what works for our team based on our needs. You might not have a team like ours. You might have different needs. You might do things differently. And that is OK. Different things work for different people. This is what works best for us. But you should use what works best for you. Even if none of the tools or processes in here are helpful, I'm hoping maybe some thought processes or something will help you with your tools in your process. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Chris Ford. I have 23 years experience working on the web, 13 years of those as a freelance designer. It's my fifth consecutive year speaking at WordCamp Orange County. They still keep inviting me back. And I have never played Dungeons and Dragons, so I am going to screw things up. If you are a fan, I apologize in advance. And just so I can irritate all fandoms that once made the force live long and prosper with one ring to rule all the muggles. Basically, about a year ago, I got a job as a project manager at Reactive Studios. And it was a really interesting time to come on because Andrew Norcross, who just spoke, was a partner in the company, and he was leaving. It was a very small company. I had been doing some contracting for their Plug and Design Palette Pro. And Josh actually said, hey, are you interested in being a project manager? And I said yes. And the challenge at the time is there were three people on the team. There was our president and two developers. And so project managing was pretty, you know, I know this thing, you know that thing. We have a couple tools to share those things. But for the most part, everyone could kind of keep it in their head and keep it really simple and loose. And it worked because it was a really small team. I joined last July. And within the first six months of being there, we became a team of seven. We added three developers and myself, as well as a part-time support person for our plug-in. So suddenly the project management process wasn't working as well as it had in the past. And my job was to figure out how to take what worked, not completely disrupt things, but help it scale with the team, to take the things that had worked and make them better and take the things that weren't working and find new ways to make them work better. So my quest as the little Ninja project manager is to find the key of all project knowledge, which is locked inside of someone's brain and rescue and release it. There are two things that are going to make this quest a lot easier. One of your greatest assets is a like-minded minister of financial impedimenta. You can tell that I use thesaurus.com so that these sounded vaguely Dungeons & Dragony or maybe Harry Potter spells. Having someone on board who, when you say, hey, I would like to buy this tool to make our project management easier, who just goes OK, is probably the biggest key in making this a successful process. Having someone who supports what you're doing, wants to make things better, and is willing to provide you with the tools to do so is the number one thing you're going to need in your inventory when you go on this adventure. The other thing you need is a team of like-minded fellow adventurers. I could not have a successful project management system if the whole team wasn't on board. I am probably the worst at time tracking in the entire company. Our developers are awesome at it. They come up with new ideas when I introduce a new tool, they get excited about it, and they're willing to adopt it. I don't really have to fight with anyone. Everyone's on the same team. We're all on board with this idea. I believe that my job as a project manager is to eliminate BS, that no one wants to deal with emails and meeting invites and all of that. They want to do what they're good at. That's what we all want to do. No one wants to do the boring, repetitive work. I want them to be developing, not trying to figure out when the next milestone or meeting is or where that database stump is. I want to be able to get that to them quickly or have them be able to find it so they can get back to writing code, which is what they're super, super awesome at. You also need a map to know where you're going. And so when I started our project management process, I had this nice, neat little map with all the stages. Like, OK, first you get your signed SOW, then you have onboarding, your internal kickoff, your client kickoff, all the phases of a project. I don't know if you guys have ever heard that quote. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Everyone has a map until the obstacles start showing up. Like, this seems like this nice straightforward. You do A, and then you do B, and everything's awesome. And you get to the end, and the project's great, and everyone's happy. And we all know that sometimes the signed SOW comes right when the client wants to kick off, so you haven't really had time to onboard him, or really have your internal kickoff, so maybe you need to shuffle some stuff around. But at least having a map and knowing where you'd like to go in excellent circumstances is a great thing to have. One of the other things about your map is all of those nice little boxes, when you actually look at them, have about 18 different steps. So it adds levels of complexity. And in every single one of these, on every single bullet point, there's a potential that things might go awry, and you're going to have to figure out how to rearrange things, how to take a shortcut, how to take the detour. And like I said, along this route, there are going to be a lot of obstacles. The first one we ran into was the quagmire of communication breakdown. And this is where you have so many ways of talking to each other that you don't know where you said something to someone. I run into this a lot with email and Slack because searching in those is horrible. There is nothing worse than being on a call with a client and having them say, how many hours do I have left, and being like, I don't know, it's going to take me an hour to run you a budget report. That's no bueno. That does not inspire confidence. When I came on, we had the free version of Asana. And basically, Asana is a project management tool that works a lot like a to-do list. It also has little Kanban stuff, but after one project, Kanban got the axe, and we've gone to lists and been very happy with them. I was going to do a live demo on this, but I don't trust Wi-Fi, so we're going to do screenshots. If anyone wants to talk to me more about Asana afterwards, I am a huge proponent of them. Not only do they have a great tool, they're a great company. I can go ahead and do a demo with you. I set up kind of a sandbox so that you don't see any client information, but I can walk you through some of the features. The basic gist of this, though, so I don't sit up here spending 27 of my 40 minutes showing you an Asana demo, is it's a really simple way to keep track of and classify tasks who they're assigned to when they're due, when there are milestones. And so we pretty much have these templates for different types of projects. We have one for fixed big projects, one for hourly projects, one for retainer projects. So when I onboard a client, I go in, I open a project from a template. All of the basics fill in, and all I need to do is add client-specific information. So for example, in this one, you can see what a task looks like, what a sample project looks like. On, let's see, can I use my handy dandy? Here we go. Can you see that? Probably not. On the left side, you can see a list of tasks. I'm a huge lover of to-do lists. I have about 18 notebooks at any time. I call my short-term memory that are full of lists. I do not have as many of those anymore because I have Asana and I can keep lists directly on the computer and don't have to worry about transferring my chicken scratch into an Excel document or a Google document two hours after a meeting when I can't remember what I wrote down. Everything can go directly in Asana. You can do things like bold text, italicized text. You can add subtasks. You can add comments. You can assign, let's see if I can go back. You can assign tasks to people. If you get the paid version, and this was probably the biggest reason I advocated for upgrading to a paid account is you can set date ranges and not just due dates. So I can go in, oh, you can also add pictures. If you have an image like a comp or a PDF or anything like that for a client, you can basically paste it into a comment and it'll upload it. It's great for having conversations about wireframes and things like that. You can follow everything in one thread. You can also assign sections in this. So we'll usually do something like say, okay, we've got our standard fixed bid project is done where we do discovery. Then we follow that up with a series of sprints followed by internal QA, followed by client QA, followed by reactive is a WordPress.com VIP partner. So we have to build time in for VIP reviews on our projects and launch. And so all of those will fill in and what we like to do is classify them in a sauna anytime you add a colon after whatever you've typed in, it becomes a heading. And now you can categorize things underneath it. This winds up coming in really handy when you go to the automatically, magically generated Gantt chart. I used to create Gantt charts in Excel once upon a time and every time a timeline changed you had to go into Excel and manually update it. I also used a tool called Smartsheet which let you generate Gantt charts but every time I changed something in a sauna I would have to go over and change it there. Again, one of the reasons I love a sauna so much is they're constantly developing new features like this automated timeline feature. You can also view things in a calendar and if you look you can see sprint one goes across two weeks and that's because I assigned a date range to those sprint headers. The tasks underneath will show you what's completed with a check mark and what you still have to do. This is a great tool if you've got five minutes to answer an email to a client saying here's what's coming up next week. You can look at your calendar or your timeline and immediately see what's going on. There's also this really cool progress. I've just started using this for all meeting notes, weekly progress updates for hourly and fixed bid clients, monthly updates for retainer clients. What's really cool about this is you can put the project status in a handy little green yellow red so you can tell at a glance which projects are in danger of going over time or budget, which projects have gone over time and budget and which projects are smooth sailing because they're in the green. It's the same reason I like Yoast. I love those simple little visual cues. Did I do this right? Are we doing okay right now? And then if you look at the bottom, you can see that there's a progress graph where as you complete tasks, it will actually show you your progress towards the finish line, which is just a nice little, like I go in there when I wanna see how close we are to the end. It's just a nice little reinforcement. Asana also has all kinds of little Easter eggs, like they're very much into making it fun for you. Like this month for Pride month, a little unicorn with a rainbow tail flies across your screen when you complete something. I checked a task off last night and I was like, oh, that's super cute. And he's also gender neutral. It's not a, or they are gender neutral. It's not a boy unicorn or a girl unicorn. Another awesome thing about Asana is there's a field in there for people to add their pronouns. So if you're working with a team, you can talk to people using their preferred pronouns. It's a great tool, the fact that they're really socially conscious and believe in the kind of things I believe in makes me like using them and promoting them even more. Another obstacle that everyone loves is the hobgoblin of endless meetings. This creature thrives on all of the back and forth emails you have to send to schedule a meeting and really loves meetings that could have been an email. We've just started using a tool that Josh has been using for quite a while for his own personal scheduling, but we've recently added a tool called Calendly where our team has all added their calendars. It links up to our Google calendars and allows you to set up a scheduling page for every client. So, you know, right now when you go into the dashboard you can see that we've got one client that doesn't have any events scheduled. We've got another client that has a sync meeting scheduled. You can add different event types. So like if you have sync meetings, kickoff meetings, discovery meetings, you can have a separate page for clients to sign up for each one of those. You can set up different event types. So you can say this is a sync meeting. I only want people to be able to book this 30 minute meeting within a two month period. So a lot of times on sync meetings I'm setting a month timeline because I don't want people booking meetings a month in advance. I really just want them to see the current month that we're booking meetings. Eventually if we have a need for a longer lead time we can definitely add that in but for now that seems to work well. This is what's super cool and the reason that we have these set up for individual clients is you can add team members. So if we have four people working on this project I used to have to go in and check four calendars, see wherever one was available, email the client say here's our availability for all of next week. What's your availability for all of next week? And then they would get back to me with their availability and I have to look at it and plug in and okay we finally come up with a day and oh we forgot to invite the CIO to that meeting and he can't go so now we gotta do this all over again next week. Now Calendly looks at everyone's calendars and says here are the times that are available this day based on the time everyone already has booked in their Google calendar. You can add questions to it. So in addition to the name and email address of the person booking the meeting I ask for the names, rules and email addresses of everyone attending the meeting so that I can easily send an invitation out afterwards. You can set up notifications, you can set up custom links. If you're having a webinar you can even set up payment processing so you can charge people for your meetings. We haven't quite done that yet but if you have a different business model it could be a cool thing for you to do. I used to do a lot of webinars when I freelanced and it would be perfect for something like that. This is what your client sees. You send them a simple URL for their sync meeting and they can go ahead and pick any date up to two months in advance. So say that they want to schedule a meeting for Monday, June 11th. All of the times are up here. They're showing in Pacific time because we're in Pacific time but if the client is on the East Coast all of the times will show in their time zone. So as someone who hates time zone math and often screws it up and schedules meetings at the wrong time or can't remember that someone's in central and not mountain this thing is a godsend. There's also a very cool tool that you can put into your Google calendar that lets you add a Zoom link. I'm thinking I might be able to tweak this a little more later so it does it automatically but for now someone books a meeting. I go into Google calendar where it's added the meeting where I can invite the rest of the guests. I can add the Zoom link which is the tool we use for video meetings and send the invite out to the rest of the people who are attending the meeting. One of the things I love the most about the Zoom Chrome extension is I can set all of my settings for a meeting. So if I only want people to be able to connect via computer audio and not the phone, I can. You can require passwords. You can let people join before the host. You can record the meeting automatically. So on discovery meetings I have it set to record the meeting automatically no matter what. So I can pay attention and not have to take as copious of notes as I normally would. I can be a little more present in the meeting because I know I have a recording to fall back on later if I can't remember something. And that takes us to the scariest obstacle which is the howling forest of blown budgets. More than one project has gone awry when you run out of gold before the quest is complete. The path of extended timeline runs through this forest and so you'll often be battling both of those at once. And the way we manage this is with a tool called freckle. One of the things I was happiest about when I came to Reactive was seeing freckle in use. It's one of my favorite tools because it has a pretty, pretty interface and does all kinds of awesome things. One of my favorite things that I use more than any tool that I have is the projects page. And the projects page gives me a one page view. I had to blur out client information which is why you're not getting a lot of live demos on these and why it looks like cinemax from the 80s, if anyone is that old. So what this does is it has these awesome little graphs next to each project that shows you how much of your budget you've consumed. So you can tell immediately, like this third one down, all the budget's gone. We actually went a little bit over budget on that project. But the rest of them are all looking good. It'll show you how much time was logged, how much of that time was billable, how much is un-billable, how much of that time, especially for retainer clients, was billed this month alone. You can look at last month, you can look at this month, you can run reports off of this kind of thing. This is really helpful when I get something in Slack saying, hey, we've got a request, do we have the budget for it? I can really quickly look and give a yes or no answer within minutes instead of having to sit and run a report and take 20 minutes to get back to someone on something. You can also go into individual projects and run reports. And again, this will show you exactly how much of your budget you've used. It'll show you graphs, you can go in and look at what each team member is spending on a particular project. Is the lead developer having to spend too much time on it? Is it getting too much project management time? And there are all kinds of super helpful settings. So you can set a project as billable or not billable. So all of our projects are billable except internal projects. You can add notes if there are any specific billing notes like, hey, they didn't have enough hours last month so we're bundling them together this month, leave it in a note. You can also set up billing increments which are really, really handy. So you can set them, you can have no billing increment so you can bill like one minute and 30 seconds which rarely happens. We set ours in five minutes because that's kind of the average time to answer a quick email. And we don't wanna bill 15 minutes every time we answer an email. There's a timer functionality on this that I don't have screenshots of but again, I can show you examples afterwards if anyone wants to come up. My favorite, favorite, favorite thing is the quick budget feature where you can figure out how many hours you have for a project. You can set these up to be one-time budgets for a whole project, monthly budgets, quarterly budgets, all kinds of different budgets and it will keep track of them based on the type that you've set up which leads into budget alerts. I get an email and I can set this number so I can set it at 50. I can reset it at 75, again at 85. So I'll get emails when a project's in danger of going over budgets so I know about it when it's soon enough to do something about it. And then there's these awesome reports you can run that will let you check like this is an example of one of our developers last week and so you can see what projects they were working on, what was billable, what was unbillable, lots of awesome graphics that as a designer at heart I love looking at because again it's that instant visual, I know exactly what's going on with the budget of this project right now. Knowing how you've spent your time is awesome but we ran into an issue where we weren't sure where people were going to be spending their time a month from now or two months from now. And so we signed up for this tool called Forecast and what Forecast does is once a month at the beginning of the month Josh and JR Lead Developer and I can all sit down for an hour and look at every project we currently have active and how people are gonna be utilized on that project. So that we make sure we have all of our project hours covered and we can also go in and make sure that no one's in the red spending way more hours than they have because we believe in a work-life balance and we don't want you working 226% of your output and that's actually because Nick is gone that week and I haven't adjusted it yet but again it's nice to see like oh hey the second week in June Jay's in the red, he's at 102%, we need to figure out a way to shift some of his projects around, shift some of these deadlines around so that no one is underutilized and no one is overutilized. This is my big bugaboo is the monotony monster. I hate doing repetitive things. I hate doing boring things. I don't want to copy 80 bug reports out of one tool and paste them into another one. I don't want to copy and paste things from my email into my project management tool. I want to do the things that push our company further not busy work, you know? And so a lot of what we do that I've been focusing on is how do we automate a lot of these processes? How do we, now that we sort of have a framework in place, now that we kind of know where we're going, we've conquered some of these obstacles in our way, how do we make those things more efficient? So one of the things we do is not all of our clients are as in love with Asana as I might be. They're used to using their email, they email people all the time and that's great. We want our clients to use the communication method they feel the most comfortable with. We, I'm not someone, you know, I'll give gentle reminders that I've moved something from email over to Asana so that we can keep track of everything. But if someone emails me the whole project and through follow-up projects, I'm not going to tell them not to, they're the client, right? So what I did is I downloaded this awesome add-on for Asana directly into Gmail. So now when a client sends me an email, all I need to do is create a new task and I can name the task, I can assign it to myself or another team member, I can send a due date, I can add it to a project, I can add a description and so when I create new tasks, it just sends that whole thing magically over to Asana and now I don't have to ever go back to my email and do a horrible tech search to try to find something. It's in the one source of truth. It's that one Asana to rule them all. What's that? I'm pretty sure they also released one for Outlook recently, but they're so good at putting out tools. There's probably a new feature every week. I'm sorry, I can't hear you. I believe there's a Chrome extension you can use in a similar manner too that's not dedicated to Gmail, so if you were just on any web mail or just any web page, you could highlight something. Yeah, they've made this one a lot better. There used to be kind of a bare bones version, but the fact that it takes the entire email over and puts it into a comment so that you have the original email thread in your Asana is so, so nice. This is brand new and I am so in love with this that they're probably tired of hearing me talk about it in the general Slack channel. It integrates with Slack now, so you can now link Slack with Asana if you paste a Slack URL into Asana, it automatically pops up the task right in there. So you can either click a button to view the task in Asana, you can mark it complete. So a lot of times I'll be going through Asana and I'll say, hey, you know, Nick, is this task done? And he says, yeah. And either he and I can go in and mark it complete. Or I can say, hey, Jay, I've assigned this to you but I know you're busy, can you reassign this to another dev on the team who you know you has bandwidth? And it's another way of taking that kind of immediate Slack conversation and being able to put it someplace that Slack search is God's so, so, so bad. Like if I have to find something in Slack, it is gonna take me a half an hour to go through all of the possible channels that I could have Heidi hold that away in. So being able to have stuff in Slack, to view the task in Slack, it's really helpful. Zapier, I finally know how to pronounce it because at the bottom of the screen, their logo is Zapier Makes You Happier. So I was really pleased. I never knew how to say that and thank you for the rhyming Zapier. And so a lot of what we are doing on the things that don't have integrations is last week, we started taking a tool we use for bug tracking and we used to kind of, the reason we like using this particular tool is it lets you have a friend and form of a database. So bug reports just come in via form and then they get dumped into a database but then those need to go into Asana for our developers to look at. So the process used to be client submits a form. I get an email that says, hey, there's a new record in your database. I go in, I make sure that it's actually a bug. If it is, I copy and paste all the information into Asana, assign it to a developer and now all I need to do is go in, look at it, yep, that's a bug, click a box and it gets automatically sucked into Asana. You can set up triggers for your air trade table record so I say anything that's in the table, bugs and issues, in the view confirmed bugs. I want you to move it to Asana and here's the information I want you to suck in from it. So anything that's green is a table in the database and it will automatically pull it in to a nicely formatted Asana task. This is a really cool tool. When we were in Nashville for WordCamp US, our team was talking about creating an automated tool, just to check scrutinizer and CircleCI and whether someone needs to review the PR or not. We named it Cluck because Nashville Hot Chicken and our developers just finished developing it so you can now run slash commands and slash on a particular repo and it will automatically give you the status of, you know, this one needs a PR review, it passed the CircleCI test, it's passed scrutinizer and it's passed the WPCS tasks. I don't use this as much, but it saves our developers loads and loads of time and I actually go in there and I can take a look and if it looks like, you know, there's a task that's associated with a PR, you can prompt people, you know, hey, can you help so and so out on this? Which brings us to the ring of iteration, this is kind of the secret weapon, is all of this stuff is constantly in flux. I don't have a final project management process, I probably never will because every project we learn something new in our retrospective, every week Asana introduces a cool new integration, something like that and so it constantly changes. For instance, right now we're talking about creating a tool called Team Hub which is going to take all of these disparate tools and by leveraging their APIs pull them into one tool so instead of having to have 18 tabs with 18 different tools open, we have one tab with our dashboard and all of our project information that pulls in the information we need but lets us go to those original tools. Like we don't want to recode Asana, right? Asana is a great tool. If we can pull the bare bones information in and know what stuff we have to do next week and what milestones are coming up and what meetings are coming up, we can go to Asana or go to Calendly or go someplace else to get the details but it makes it a little bit easier and so that's kind of one of the iterations we're working on. I've got some quick, this is something really cool that we've put in that lets us give status updates and posts so that we can post a really quick conversation like, hey, I saw this cool article on GDPR or we can post longer blog posts like here's how I created this scaffolding component for WPCLI and so with all of those tools, hopefully your quest is successful. You can pass all of the obstacles and not throw tomatoes at me for horribly bastardizing Dungeons and Dragons. Question over here, Chris. Quick caveat, if your question starts off, this is more of a comment than a question. I would love to talk to you about it but I'd like to save it till after so more people have a chance to ask questions. Calendly, does that also integrate with Outlook? Yes, Calendly will work with Outlook. Anyone else? Anyone else? I mean, I guess I'll let comments through if no one has questions. Is there somewhere, you mentioned a lot of different things that I like the look of, is there a list somewhere? Are you gonna tweet out a list of all the different tools that you mentioned? Yeah, yeah, and I'll have my slides up on speaker deck afterwards. So the question was, is there, if they're on mic, do I need to re-ask the question or am I good? Okay, awesome. Fake news. Log in and then start the clock. Is that how the actual time is recorded? The question is about Freckle, our time tracker, and how time is recorded, is that right? Basically, I've set up Freckle with a whole bunch of hashtags. It works like Twitter. So there are clients, there are projects, and then you can tag things. Everyone has a little timer that lets you run multiple timers throughout the day that you can pause and restart. And so if you're going into a meeting for a particular client, you push play on their timer. When you're done, you push stop, and it lets you put tags in. So if I put in hashtag meeting-team, I know that that was a internal weekly meeting that our team has for this particular client, and it's billable. And so when you get a time sheet, it will track, these are the projects this person worked on, here's how long they spent on it, and here's how it's tagged. So you can get really, really granular with how you look at how time is being spent. Is it in meetings? Is it on development? Is it in QA? Did that answer your question? All right, a big round of applause for Chris Ford. Thanks, Steve. Thank you.