 Hello, I think we have three minutes, but if you are sitting in the back half of the room, if you feel comfortable, no pressure, I'd love for you to come to the front part of the room, one, because the room's not very full, and second, I do like to get people talking and the mic's up here, and so it'll be a lot easier for everybody to hear. So if you're in the back half and you feel comfortable to move forward and there's really nice people here, I met someone named Amy who seemed very nice, so I'm gonna go ahead and get started because I think, also they do not have anything scheduled for this room because I'm the last session of the day, yay, and the good thing is this is really fun, so all of you who have been like cramming things into your head, like just relax, this is really fun, the slides will be up, and mostly you'll just get it, like you'll go, oh yeah, why hadn't I thought of that before? So I also don't know everything, and actually you guys know just as much, so if you would like, I'll go through all the slides, but we can actually stay and play a little bit after if you like. So hello, I now started a new job with Pantheon, and so I am buying everyone here a free account at Pantheon, so if you go to getpantheon.com you can have a free hosted website, until you want to make it go live and then we charge you money, but actually I think as developers, if it's for your own personal site, your website, I do believe it's free, and I just don't know how to do it yet because I just started Monday. So I'm sponsored by Pantheon and I'm also sponsored by Top Shelf Modules, so you can ask me about either one of those later, but right now it's all about you. So I was so surprised that they actually picked this topic because this has been a passion of mine for a very long time, and I am so glad that you're here to share it with me. All right, who's here? How many are engineers? Yay, okay. How many, and I call everybody who actually does the building, site building, designing, naming, all of you are engineers. How many people are here from a development company or an agency? Okay. How many are from the client side, like you're with a university or an organization or a library? And you guys actually have the harder job. I want everybody to appreciate how hard their job is because they can't fire their client. So that makes it really, really hard, right? And so I think you will get a lot of takeaway because if you actually treat your internal stakeholders with some of this rigor, it will help you not go crazy. How many of you are thinking about a project? You're like a customer and you're getting ready to go into a project? Nobody? Those are the people I like to talk to. They should be here. Go find some. How many are in a project that they wish they didn't have to finish? Yeah. Oh, yay, okay. So maybe we can do a little rescue triage here, okay? So I talked to some of you and I do know some of the things that you're trying to get to and I hope you leave with some really good tools today. And they're all really dead simple. There's nothing fancy that I do. I've just been doing it forever. So my name is Susan Rust. I've been in Drupal since 4.7 and I picked Drupal because it was actually the one at the time that had clean URLs. And if I can encourage you guys walking in to come forward and sit up front, that would be awesome. I've done tiny, tiny jobs. I did a three-page website for a tiny, it's not even a church. They're called plant sites or something like that. And a woman named Betty ran the whole thing, all 12 people that attended this little tiny thing. And I felt sorry for them and I built them a little Drupal site. And I've done really big enterprise projects with the National Episcopal Church and SDG&E and Ion Media and things like that. And then from this morning's note, I found out that I'm a dictator and I was so pleased to find out that I actually have a role in Drupal and that's why actually I love being here with this community. So I ended up with a design shop, a graphic design shop, and I kept doing logos and people kept saying, yeah, but where's my website? That looks awesome. And I'm like, you understand that print and web are not the same thing, right? And they're like, yeah, but whatever. So I learned to build websites and then I learned to do Drupal. Thank goodness for the Google. Any questions so far? Is everybody in the right place? They want to learn how to do ugly baby meetings? So we have to know why projects fail because actually to have a cure or a remedy or a solution for everything, you have to know why it happened in the first place. There has to be a little bit of diagnosis. So why do projects fail? Somebody tell me. Why do projects fail? Yeah. Yeah. Managing expectations. Everybody's expectations, right? So that's very important. Why else do projects fail? Who has a, yes, guy with the hat. More planning. Yeah. You mean not enough planning. Yes. Oh, yeah. A roadmap to go somewhere. Money or what happens on projects where there's nobody on the client side working on it? So I build us a site. We have 27,000 pages of content and yeah, just figure it out for us. Like that works well, right? So one of the things I would like you guys to start understanding and seeing for yourself is avalanches happen how? One snowflake at a time. But if you've ever been on ski patrol or been up in the mountains, they know where the avalanches are going to happen, right? And actually now in hindsight when you look at your bad projects, don't you kind of know that that was an avalanche just waiting to happen? How many of you were ever truly, truly surprised that the avalanche happened? Yeah, no one, right? So one of the things is you have to listen to yourself. So I don't read all the slides, but this one's really important. Failed projects are doomed from the beginning. No one wants to admit it. And that's the genesis. And so one of the things about not having ugly client baby meetings is to not turn them into projects or not turn them into projects yet. Any questions? So on the client side, so one of the things that clients often think is that the website will cure all of their business woes. They don't have process in place. They haven't analyzed their business. They don't even know what they're trying to do. But if they would just get a new website and marketing could go to town, everything would be okay. And the truth is that a website only presents data and it only is a reflection of their internal clarity. So if they don't have internal clarity, what's the website project going to be? It's going to be a mess. And so this is one of those avalanche moments where you can say, ah, first thing, they have no business rules written down anywhere. Now, how many of you have seen business rules that go something like this? Well, we send out an email and then we attach a word doc, then fill in the blank, fill in the blank, fill in the blank. Is that a business process? No, it's not a business process. I'm working with a client right now that sends secure data back and forth via email and random other channels. And they're so worried about if the Drupal site's going to be secure. It's like, you know, you just sent all that data over the email to 75 people. So they don't have a business process around their communication of important data. So how do we model that properly for Drupal? And you have to solve that question before you can begin the project. So one of the things that I say about clients and projects is that day one is the best it's ever going to be. It's kind of like a boyfriend or a marriage, right? Like the honeymoon phase is as good as it's going to get. After that, there's dirty dishes and dirty socks. So if you're not really loving the vendor, if you're really not loving the client, if it's just not, you know, you don't have that chemistry, like you don't feel like you're on the same side, is the project actually going to be fun to work on? And how many of you have a client or a project now that it's not thinking wrong with a project, it's the chemistry with the client? It makes work going to work really hard. And when you want to go to work and it's really hard, it takes all the joy out of you. And when it takes all the joy out of you, it's really hard to succeed. And what happens when you tie up all your time, because some of you that I spoke to around the room are pretty small. So what happens if you take up 80% of your billable time with a client and a project you don't love? It's just tough. And one of the things about doing well as a solopreneur and entrepreneur, small group, is that you have to all love what you're doing. And there's an opportunity cost to every decision you make. So I actually saw something very similar to this in Dallas-Fort Worth. They built a... Dallas-Fort Worth airport is as big as the island of Manhattan. And they built this monorail that went around. And I would drive by it every day, tune from work. And at one point I went, that's not going to meet. And my husband went, ah, you don't know what you're talking about? And sure enough, but they kept building. Like I was seeing it at an angle from the road and I could tell it wasn't going to meet. The engineers were standing there looking at each other every day and they knew it wasn't going to meet. But they kept building and they built within like 20 feet of each other. Like, but you could tell a long way off, right? Like maybe a half mile down. Like, yeah guys, we need a S-curve in here, but they never did it. They never did it. So lack of planning and then the desire not to stop and do some planning. So how many of you guys think that it's a good idea for me to take a backpack and decide that I'm going to climb Everest? It's really not. Oh, you think it's a good idea? Oh, he's trying to get rid of me already. So this is what happens though. They're all engineers in general love to write code and there's an urge and a deep desire to get a project and start building. But this is how those end up. It's not a good idea. I can't walk very far. I get high altitude sickness and in general I'm not that athletic. So I probably shouldn't plan a trek to to Everest in an afternoon. And then we also have what I call the project fantasy is that at the beginning of every project we think it's going to feel and look like this. But we know it's going to be like this. But in order to be in business like we have to keep kind of having that fantasy. So today I hope we cover some things to get the projects looking more like this and last like that. So any any questions so far? Okay. So one of the things that I started out very early on is realizing that one of my gifts I need to step back. One of my gifts is that I am not an engineer but I can speak pigeon engineer. And I don't really I'm not a formal business analyst but I'm very good at defining that gap between the client wanting something and what engineering wants to build. And that is how many of you are kind of like under five people in your company? This is the biggest strength that you can have and if you have a small company you probably and are successful you probably are already doing this in some pretty concrete or maybe ununderstood way. And if you can keep developing that skill and developing the strength and muscle to do it better and better your projects will become way more professional or not professional profitable. So what I found is that clients do this. I want to do this and because this is how I do it in my business and the engineer goes yep I can build that and they go okay and the engineer goes off and builds that and it's really expensive because it's custom or the clients just start talking about all their business process and their clients and their metrics and the engineers just go I don't care. Tell me what to code. I will build you anything just stop talking about that and so there's just this big gap and then the client goes well what can I have and the engineer says anything I'm an engineer and like well what does that look like well whatever you want it to look like I'm an engineer. So there's this impasse between what it is what can be built and what's possible and what's inexpensive and what's a good choice and all that kind of stuff. So this became the first part of my consulting life is kind of doing this translation. What do I mean by if a client is uncoachable is one of the reasons projects failed? Who's got a who's got an example of an uncoachable client? Yeah yeah that's a good example. What about clients that say I know exactly what I want? Yeah or yes yes they're trying to guide you through engineering speak because they know better. So to me coachable clients are people that don't listen to me I don't care what it is it's about where to park whatever as a dictator you have to actually be coachable and that doesn't mean that you just accept everything that I say but it means that when I'm really serious about saying I think this is the best path for you and this is why that you consider it carefully. It doesn't mean that that is the answer but that you think about it deeply and you say yes I see why you think that and here are things you don't know about my business. That's a coachable client they're teaching me I'm teaching them it's a relationship. People that don't want to be guided aren't going to make you happy and the project won't go well. What do I mean by this wrong shop-to-client mix? How many of you taken a project that's either too small too big or slightly out of your wheelhouse? Keep your hands up. How many of those projects went really really well? Yeah so it's a odd mix because if you never take anything out of your wheelhouse it's boring right and if you don't grow and you don't learn the next thing and it's also really smart when you're a growing shop to really be advised not to tackle the things that you can fail at spectacularly. Little failures are good right fail often fail quickly but fail where it doesn't count like it won't drive you out of business you won't have to let people go your reputation will be damaged and your reputation at the size that you are is everything so be sure that when you say yes to projects they're the right project for your company in the right part of your growth cycle and it's always good to take on something a little challenging but be sure that you can get resources and support to help you grow. Who took on something really big and was successful at it? Let's hear that story because that's more interesting. I saw a little tiny hand right there yes and how did you do it successfully? Nice so she didn't do exactly what I was going to recommend but her client was exactly what I was going to recommend was tackle big things with alliances and in that instance they because it was the data and they were the data creators that was an alliance and that's a really good way to grow and be very honest about it and say and decide up front what the risks are for you and for them and be open about that on risk and then also say let's have a triage point where we can pull the plug where we won't be the right vendor right like wouldn't that make it a lot easier like if you just had that honesty of communication and they were clear and then if it doesn't work out are they mad at you no because we already decided up front that we may or may not be able to do it and usually end up like giving them free research time and things like that because you want to grow to that so that's a really good way to have done it and that was a wise way to tackle that project so now is anybody in here strongly invested in the front end design of things okay I hope I don't make you mad so I started out as a designer the graphic artist so I speak with this from having come from that place and what I have found to make money and do the least amount of work like that is the other thing that we want to do right so I also used to do interior design because I have a BFA and I the analogy that I use is that I can't order your wallpaper and your drapes until we've built the house because at the end of the day I don't really know exactly where everything's going to end up and if I do it I can do it before the project I can do it before but you're going to pay more money because I'm going to order way more wallpaper than I need and the drapes aren't really going to fit and we're going to have to tailor them so the first thing is you have to do the analysis what should the site do then you engineer how that's going to work in Drupal and then you overlay your beautiful design onto that which already works how many of you get really beautiful comps from somewhere how many of those projects are really fun to build yeah not so much because every single button you have to you're reverse engineering the end so it's kind of like me ordering 175 yards of fabric and laying it down there and go build me the windows that fit the drapes right and I it doesn't work and so what I do and I was going to build a slide for this and I'm sorry I ran out of time but there's actually a process where you do all of your business analysis and then you go into engineering and you can start your design because you in the front part of the process you have built your wire frames and then at the very end the last two weeks of a project is theming how many of you theme kind of continuously through the project save yourself so much time and money don't do it don't do it just wait until the end leave everything as ugly and gray as possible build yourself this very generic version of of your site do it in Bartik whatever garland it doesn't matter get your client to quit looking at design when you're trying to talk engineering what do I mean by this focus on trees not the forest how many of you have clients that keep moving pixels on you that's what happens when you start design too early it drives you crazy and it takes a lot of time and a lot of money and nothing really ever gets built because you're just moving pixels and changing hex colors so but it can be about anything it can be about billing it can be about wanting to see hours it's about wanting to have a client meeting every day it's anytime that what they're requesting doesn't move the ball forward who's got a good example of a behavior like this yes yeah so she had comps and they kept adjusting the comps trying to guess what people were going to how they were going to use something that had not yet been built and that's a really a good example of that and that's a really good example of why you take away design until you're done with engineering so how many of you have clients that like want itemized bills and why did this planning take why did you have to do 25 minutes of research on this module how many of you have that how do you cure that awesome who who has a cure for that yes yeah yeah that is actually a good good methodology is to staying clear communications a lot of times as a small company that is a big challenge who else has a good solution for that yes yeah so she's saying that kind of just basically saying why are you nitpicking me like let's have and have that conversation up front wonderful what do i mean by process driven then rather driven and it's a little bit about what we talked about so i'm going to move on so one of the things that i've discovered in working on a lot of projects is that if you think you're you're estimated your project at 200 hours how much time does the client have to put in 200 hours and they don't really know this so it's up to you to educate them that hey you know we're going into a thousand hour project we're going into a 1500 hour project it does often take that much time because the larger the site the more people the more stakeholders the more meetings and they need to be prepared to do that work that's a big risk point and these are just things we hate to hear right like nobody likes this uh any of these things and and i'm glad you guys are laughing because i hope you understand that these are universally true like there it's happened to all of us and happened to who has who has never had anything on this list happen to them see i'm not really that smart so let's talk about now that we've kind of identified like what the problem is like how to avoid them so a project requires a visionary it can be you and you should also have someone on the other side of the fence who is also a visionary without the two of you and whoever the visionary is it can be the owner it can be the i have an extraordinary project manager that i get to work with every now and then but they have a very strong vision of how this is going to get done and when maybe not from an engineering standpoint but they're very clear on how they're going to work with the clients and all that stuff so identify who that visionary is and i i find it interesting that often the person in charge of the project is the engineer who's trying to be heads down in code and so the person that is heads down cannot by default be the visionary and business owners unfortunately often are left brain right brain and can do both but at some point it's not good necessarily the most effective way so when i was doing consulting i actually trademarked the term client wrangling and i actually got hired to do client wrangling so it was pretty fun what do i mean by force projects into an mvp state who knows what mvp is okay so mvp is the minimum viable product so it's the smallest unit of thing that you can create features to say it's a website so usually projects come in and there's like 20 pages of things and you meet with the client and it's hours and hours of stuff and your job is to force notice i don't say suggest i say force a project into an mvp state so those are the reasons for it but who can tell me why this makes sense not those are like great reasons but why is it really important for you to do this very early on who's raising their hand yes it's actually that's actually true but the other part of it is not only fail but succeed the smaller you make it the less complicated the task the more likely you are to succeed and what happens the minute you succeed you have instant trust then you can keep growing and stretching and getting into more and more complicated things so if you force that first unit into and you know when you're a small business owner and someone's like i have a $50,000 site i have a hundred thousand dollar site i have a 300,000 whatever your metric is for a juicy project cut it in half cut it in to 25% cut it into the smallest unit you can because if you knock that out of the park all those other bad client behaviors a lot of them will disappear because they trust you you've had a win together and that's the most important thing you can do so who has a good example of that oh anybody here doing that a few of you okay go ahead someone said something it doesn't always work it doesn't always work tell me why can wait one moment can everybody hear her now can you come to the mic we do a lot of projects where we take over Drupal sites and fix them and then you know then the client wants us to then add new functionality to it right so the fixed part is actually the easy part right now when somebody's built something wrong or it's not secure or whatever so we'd say let's just bite that off as a small piece we can show them how we can make their site work better and and they're all oh wow this is working great and then we move on to new functionality and we break it down into chunks and it's still hard to put new functionality into a site you haven't built because other developers don't do things the way you do and they're like well we really we know that you've done all this other stuff for us but we want this faster and quicker and it doesn't it didn't build the trust at all is that a coachable client no no okay so there you go so that's a good it's a good process but then if it doesn't work you're back to square one with throwing the client away but but it comes from actually deciding at the front end whether the client was coachable and that and then that is really important so you see how like if you don't have that coachable client all along the process you can't really ever grow them into a good partnership so and the other thing is picking the right team internally and externally and this is often what i see and when i say team i mean like the client's team i actually talked to someone who's doing this mega enterprise site and the project manager literally was a recently former massage therapist but she was the most technical person because she knew how to do social media so they made her in charge of this project so what would i tell you now that you know me what would i tell you to tell the client when their team is awful yeah no you're not necessarily bi but you have to say your team is awful yeah so it's you can you have to say it more diplomatically and you can say you know i for this kind of project these are the areas of expertise that i need covered with your team or perhaps these are people that need to be more team oriented these are people that actually have to have time to do this project and you know we talked about time earlier oh is that a coachable client yes the contact uh huh yeah so your client wrangling is what you are yeah you're hurting so um and this last part is important too like different people need to be on the team at different times you don't need everybody doing the whole project the whole time necessarily so kind of kind of manage that like we don't we don't think often as companies that we're the ones in charge of organizing that but yeah you got you kind of are yes mm-hmm and then they're often not coachable because they know they don't have to be yeah that's why i said you guys have the hardest job um and a lot of it can be helped by process where it's a little passive aggressive where you say and it's the only thing that you can do is say oh well i see that you want these things done but here's our process and as soon as you get your part done we'll do our part so that that helps but you actually have to have a fairly formal structured process that has the sanction and permission to hold and as an in a piece of in business unit with integrity so uh we talked about triage things and all that kind of stuff but teamwork is important uh one of the things i was with a team and they were they had a very very big site to do and they had 90 000 and i'm like wow it's kind of skimpy he goes yeah we burned through the other million other 900 000 it was a million dollar budget i said what happened to the other 900 000 they spent a year going down um the road with vignette but that's that's not the tragic part this wasn't a fault of vignette so i don't want anyone to say i don't want any legal letters this is not the fault of vignette this was the fault of the client whose engineering team sat in the sales meeting knew dead on that it would not handle users the way the project spoke uh you know the project specs were and they had no authority even as the technical team to throw a flag on the play and say this will fail so everybody in your company everybody on the client side you have to have this important meeting that says everybody has a permission to throw a flag on the play and stop development so we can talk about it and that is just a clear boundary that will help so much because often on a very difficult client somebody on the other side is knowing some drama that's going on that's going to derail it they know very early on they just don't think it's their job to say so and so you have to empower people to help you get these kinds of things done um anybody have a good juicy story about that besides my good juicy story that was a pretty sad one right $900,000 down the thing yeah it's more it is difficult it's a it's a big cultural change when you're inside of an institution you could be inside of a big org or dot edu or or association and it's tough and it's it is a very deep cultural change and that's why it's like it actually takes leadership and vision and people on the team who are more heads down doing the work they they need that leadership and vision and a lot of times if you just write this document down and say just to let you know as the consulting firm as a development firm these are our norms that we're bringing to this project and we will respect anybody on the team that does this so maybe inside the or inside of the whole institution but maybe you can create enough of a safe haven just enough breathing room for that to happen uh let's see um so most of you know this kind of thing that there's three things if you want something faster you have to give us more money and less features and blah blah blah so it's kind of a thing like that but what's also important is that there needs to be three different people if you are the person wearing all these three decision points it doesn't really work the system works best in tension so look at your own development team your project management your ownership styles all the different stakeholders and assign these roles let someone be an advocate for features let someone be an advocate for budget let someone be an advocate for time in general it's something like that up there I don't think I have a laser pointer on this but those top three stakeholders normally it's something like that but it's very important to keep that tension alive that's what keeps the project taught and moving forward so you guys get this right and these are these are really important things to do here and so now I'm going to give you an actual solution tool so um doing a big project I think it's close to half million dollars and uh even in the very beginning though one of the things that I do is I actually start with this matrix with with the client so remember how we were saying MVP minimum viable product the first thing I always try to do is to never have custom development in phase one as little custom Drupal as possible try to do Drupal out of the box you guys forget how magical Drupal is to people that don't know what it does like you forget and now it's not so uh rare but there was a time when if you could just have login that was something you used to pay 20 grand for like there Drupal does amazing things views is magical like if you ever sit down and explain to someone who doesn't understand content management system the whole concept of views and blocks their mind is blown like Drupal does amazing things if you do nothing with it but just build a site and manage content and have users so we try to start with everything um that is critical and as much out of the box as possible I really try to stay in quadrant one that's a one one and I do this with the client so we would like blah blah blah to integrate with blah blah blah and then show up magically on this page it's like great is it critical well it's a yeah well maybe so it's needed well marketing would really like it like if you really drill down into what's critical for a lunch that list is really surprisingly small sometimes so keep pushing and then I tell them they don't get the stuff in the yellow that's off the table for the first conversation and that really helps them and you know what they really like this because this is something they can wrap their heads around because they don't know in general what Drupal does out of the box like it's pretty cool and even language in the contract says unless otherwise stated you're getting Drupal out of the box you had some expectation well if Drupal out of the box doesn't do that it's not covered so what did I just give you the secret to yeah that's one of the big expectations I thought Drupal did that well yes it does then why don't I have it because you didn't pay seventy five thousand dollars for it well I think I should get that because I thought it was important right how many of you had that conversation like why doesn't Facebook work differently on my website than it does everywhere else right so how many of you would find this useful anybody doing something similar okay awesome so um but you can use this kind of matrix for everything so let's see is this the second one okay so midway in this very very big project um it's been going on for 14 months very big team of engineers working on it and a month before launch a month before launch end of a huge sprint cycle of like six sprints the client came back oh they finally did some testing and their list came in it was like a rainstorm of new features and changes and and it was horrifying right like you get four typewritten pages of things that they think should be different or work differently and so the product owner he's like yeah I want all these changes and the project manager who's in charge of time is going nothing's getting done I've got my sprint plan and the engineers are like meh I'll throw something else out and build that I don't care right so we have two of the three people kind of like at at odds and I'm like okay great let's make a matrix and they're like rolling their eyes but this is what we did we said look things are either done or they've kind of been engineered or they're built right that's kind of the state of how you can find something in in the actual project and it's either an independent thing meaning that it's a it's a request that doesn't touch anything else right or maybe it's a little related it might touch some other things so there's some possibility of breaking or uh oh this will mess with the entire structure of organic groups and all the dashboards so we just did this matrix and if it was built and it was integral to everything else that was built they didn't get it and what was really great was that it made everybody sit down and put everything in a matrix which took like 15 minutes like can you imagine how long people would have spent arguing over this otherwise so they took the four pages and we put them in here and went that's pretty good and so we came up with like a one and a half page list and then we did this because we're still trying to meet that deadline right just because they crammed in a bunch of stuff they're not going to let us launch later and we did that like it's less than 20 hours it's more than 20 hours or it's a black hole like we got to do research it's probably going to change the scope and we came back to them with what came out in the green and said this is what can get done without costing you extra money or time and they went okay but see we actually had a reason and a rationale and when we showed them we actually showed them the matrix list and they went okay that's really reasonable and they were happy like but the whole four pages when it came in had that client must be done for launch right but you can kind of help them sort through that so this is tremendously valuable and you can do this like I want to go on a vacation and we need people to work like you can make up your matrix all day long and it just is very helpful it's very fast so planning we talked about that earlier okay how am I doing on time oh I've got four minutes okay so I want to tell you some other really good things so when I first got to one of my clients that we grew their shop from three to 15 people this is what they did this was what a dev shop does and this is what they do now so all of you need to add more of the stuff in right now and so I'm going to just talk to you about these four things so that you can see them and I think I have to oh don't laugh at Homer are you guys having fun are you guys learning stuff very weak say yes I'm being recorded okay okay so the first thing is how many of you is omni outliner favorite tool of mine everybody write that down that's an incredible tool so we actually do audits so we actually spend time figuring out all the URLs that we're going to build and what it is and and like that there's notes in here like which are third-party integrations needs more discovery things that are problems there's another corollary document that actually goes with it that is also done in omni outliner that actually starts to capture what it is content type view walk etc and that actually you can add right in here because you can do columns with that the other thing I'm going to spend a little bit more time on storyboards but there's a thing called snippets so when I first got to this company I looked at their tickets and the ticket said build a view and for more information see specs is that a ticket how many of you have tickets that look like that okay when you're one guy and it's in your head you met with the client you know them you can do that the minute there's two it can't work anymore and it starts to disintegrate it's that avalanche moment that i'm telling you about but even if you're one person you should do this so now can you guys see that no I don't know how to make it bigger this is a very cumbersome tool for that let me see if I can just do this okay is that better okay so now when they put in a ticket that says build a view this is what it starts doing because if you build a view three times you haven't made any money on it and just the simple thing like knowing what the url is going to be in advance what are the fields there's actually more of this where it says every field has to be whether the label is hidden displayed what are the image cache profiles are you using the image fields from some other view all that kind of stuff and what happens if you do this for your entire site up front you start to see that you only need four image presets not 22 you see that you only need to use this field as a reference rather than building it uniquely on each view this helps speed up everything makes your site way more scalable how many of you build out dashboards okay so that's the best thing that you can do in Drupal and this is something that we do early in discovery is that we don't bother with what the wireframes are so much we build them their dashboard wireframes because what surfaces when you build the wireframe dashboard for the end user someone tell me I'm not going to pick on you just because I haven't picked on enough people but I'm so glad you have anything who knows why you would want to build a wire dashboard somebody raise their hand yes it's what they care about most but what is what's often they're like well how do I manage this and that this turns into a whole thing right so if you build the dashboard and lay that out that tells you every content type you need it tells you every feature you need it tells you every view that you need it tells you what they're expecting the site to do because if they want to manage it from here and you cannot believe the gaps that come up once we do that they're like hey how can I do this and it's like that was never anywhere in any of the documents and that's so valuable okay we're actually at time and if you want to go you can there's nothing until the final keynote so if you want to stay I just have a few more things and then this is and you can actually leave after this if you choose oh I have 15 minutes oh yay oh good I thought the time went really fast okay so okay good because this is really important so this is something that I started doing very recently called storyboards and storyboards are incredible and if you have any facility of of storytelling this is what it is so how many of you do any kind of user stories so user stories are great except for it doesn't translate into anything Drupal it's just a paragraph and at the end of the day the gap is is that you can take all the user stories you want but engineering could care less they really don't respond to user stories so what we started doing is this thing called storyboarding and what it is it's a workflow of the user story in Drupal so it's the user story told in Drupal and so we have legends and we use the same things over and over again so this is the different roles and let me tell you I scoped a project they said oh we only have three users we only need that three people that's all that'll ever log in and administrate the site and 17 roles later we're like at the organic group so this is really important and then how many of you work with very non-technical customers this is the best tool for you so this is also done in OmniGraphel and so you can do this yourself and so I tell a little story of oh darn it I'm not supposed to have that up there don't read that so the an employee visits the site and then all this stuff happens and then a video is uploaded and then it's visited by employees okay and then these are the different things that happen here's where some taxonomy happens here's where a content type is created it has this taxonomy the person logs in it does these things gets notifications the administrator does this and then somebody logs in and they can do these different things and then a project ends and this is what they're able to do now I'll show you another one real quick so more things see a lot of people they swore only three here are content types that they said was just two and then this is a workflow around all this stuff that's all super secret and then they email it around and then but you can see like all of a sudden how you can start to take apart their word document they sent you and you can actually start turning it into Drupal and what's useful for this is that what I can do from here is really cool so in let me go back to my keynote because I have a great slide for this so so this first of all it's very very fast and so it doesn't cost anything to do because you're doing that darn user story read through anyway but it's so it's very inexpensive and lightweight which is a big savings to you and but the most important thing no matter how lowly technical your client they understand what's going on because it's their workflow that you're illustrating but what was really weird to me because you know I'm more on the the business development sales side is that my engineers loved this they were thrilled with it and you know why because I can take this document eight page document put it in front of my engineer and you know we now know what all the different symbols mean and he reads through it just like he would code and in two three four minutes he marks it up and goes problem problem this doesn't work like this yep yep find out more about this and so we get like this first pass at architecture that costs 10 minutes of his time and that's really really important and um how many of you tried to write back write up this stuff to send back to the client like you do the yeah like a scope of work this is my scope of work even for very large projects it's a preliminary one and guess what they actually read through it how many of you have had that scope of work everybody signs it there's a deposit and midway through the project they're like where's this magical feature that I was expecting and it's like well it's not in the scope of work well you overlook that you should build it for me for free yeah so this really solves that it also does something else really magical it avoids scope creep and you know why it's because they actually understood what you were selling them they understood it as an actual development cycle for what they were trying to get done so anything on that anybody have any insights or can anybody see how that they are going to find some value in that that's like the the matrix and those two things are probably the best thing you can do for yourself it accelerates architecture for free that's a big deal yes yeah omni grapple has a bunch of templates and then um they have a lot of frameworks and you can buy like people make omni grapple templates that you can insert in and then over time i've just made my own but yeah it's really fun it takes minutes and you know sometimes it's nice to do something mindlessly creative okay so lots of tools um okay how many of you have loved talking about money on a project yeah so again this is an area of coachability and so i cannot tell you the number of time is people don't actually have good budgets for their projects it's horribly underfunded it's undermanned and it's mission critical to their company and it makes no sense and so that's a really big warning flag for me um i'm working with a university right now college actually and um they've allocated no people no resources and what is the value of a student how many know how many of you are have some sense that a student they they bring in 200 to 250 thousand dollars it's a big sale a student is worth a quarter million dollars and and they're like grumbling because you're saying phase one might be 120 thousand dollars so it's really worth half a student but we want to enroll 20 000 students over the next three years but but we don't want to spend more than this so there's a funny relationship to how much they're willing to invest in so it's a very good way to start off the conversation is the value proposition of the site what is it that you want it to do and how is it that you want it to convert and don't talk about it in terms of your hours and time your hours and time are not interesting to them it's what they're trying to get done on the site i had someone um uh say you know what and i cannot tell you what a big company they were they're like we don't pay for qa and we don't pay for p.m we pay for engineering and i said great i completely get that and they now pay engineering rates for qa and p.m so it works out great you cannot not pay for qa and p.m because otherwise your engineers doing it and engineers are expensive and they're scarce so don't do that like that it's just goofy and if the client tells you that just tell them what i did that's so great we're completely on board with that and they're like why does it take so long to build everything it's like because i have to qa and p.m it um matrix magic so how many of you are really good at estimating so this is the way engineers estimate if i stay in my dorm room all night long and i drink red bull i don't text my friends i don't play world world warcraft world of warcraft um i can do this in a day a day meaning 24 hours a day to management means 6.5 billable hours so already we're like way disconnected right and and everything is never going to have a problem their environment's always going to work the deployment's always going to go well but even outside of that there's some things that you can look at as estimating how many of you are here responsible for estimating if not money at least time okay great so i borrowed this very lightly from node one and are you able to see this down here so there's some things that create variables when you're going to build something one of them is risk so if it's really important to the project you need to give yourself a little bit more buffer if on that magic matrix they said this is critical this must talk to the bibliomodule then you probably want to bump up your hours around it because you can't like be just okay that it kind of mostly works the other thing is complexity if you've done views and it's just more views great it's a one right but if it's something that you haven't quite built it's solar with a module that's still in beta it's not that it's hard but it's not something that you're completely familiar with that that complexity might be a two and then how many times you've done it it's complex it's Salesforce integration but i do those all day long this one's a little different and then a coachable client so you can see how two hours can really vary from six to eighteen and i and this is just on dev hours this doesn't count project management qa and all those other overhead things so you can see how a small business can really start to run into trouble right away if only engineering the engineering mind if it's you doing everything uh does estimating and then qa is sometimes 25 percent depending on how complex it is p.m it often takes 25 percent and then we're lucky if we can get 10 or 15 um and then uh design and theming so there's lots of things in there where a two hour project might really take you three days might take you 30 hours and so if you look at um different client a and client b you can have the same complexity and the same experience but a little bit more difficult client oh i'm sorry these should have been 1.5 um you can see like actually shifts your hours if you have to spend more time actually talking to the client about everything you need to account for that in the development time um because a lot of conversation often means a lot of revision so um how many of you have a triage points on a project how many of you know what i mean by that okay so a triage point is like have you guys seen mash or like emergency er or um there's triage if you go to the how many of you've been to the emergency room like when you come in they do actually kind of look at you and sometimes it's better than others but they decide if you're going to die or not so if you have a respiratory thing they'll take you in right away if you have arterial bleeding they'll take you in right away um and then so you get through the first point in triage and triage means every project should have a point where you can pull the plug you should discuss these with the client and you should know like at what point something's going to go wrong a triage point can be they haven't paid their bill in two weeks that's a triage point um what's another triage point what are some points where you should stop and look up yeah the client's not responding right they haven't done uat they're not getting back with you on content and decisions yes yeah so they're they're iterating before you even finish building like they're just kind of spinning that's a really good triage point how would you triage that yeah so that's that's very so that's a good uh specific for what happened in that one point but there's a bigger conversation that you can have a say oh well let's sit down and talk about how development cycles go and then you have the opportunity to how many of you work in sprints even though if they're not very formal okay so you need to explain to them what a sprint is and what happens all along the way so one of the things about managing client expectations is letting them know how it's going to go we're going to go on first date i'm going to hold your hand i'm going to take you and drop you i'll walk you all the way up to the front door and then i'll drive off on the second date we're going to go and we're going to go to this restaurant and then the ball game and then i'm going to give you a kiss on the cheek so um so that's kind of how you're going to explain sprints is like you're actually going to lay out and you're going to preempt that behavior and say this is something that often happens in a project we build something and you want something different and so here's how that's going to go and then you tell them how that's going to go in advance and then when it happens you can go oh remember that thing that i said earlier on that's in my contract and so let's decide what this is is this a new feature request is this you know so if you preempt things like that that always happen to you and some of you have things that happen to you over and over again and some of you never have those because you've learned to auto correct you can figure that out but if anything's happening to you on every project you need a preemptive conversation oh i did want to talk about this phase one phase two one of the things that i notice is people get really attached to me working on projects with them they like the fact that i'm a dictator but that i'm pretty thoughtful and methodical and help things go better and they really get some anxiety at the end of a project and they think that they have to shove everything in at the last minute because i'll go away and they'll never see me again and sometimes it's a money thing right or sometimes it's um they don't understand that they they bought a child that's growing up with them and they're never going to stop feeding and taking care of it so one of the things that i always do is every time something like that happens is i tell them oh well we're going to do that in phase two we'll do that in phase three so you're helping them understand this is a very long-term relationship with you they've just started one tiny part of the path okay do not buy the cheapest guides you do not want to go up the mountain path with the cheapest guides and you guys are the sherpas those of you that are the engineering teams in here you're the sherpas and so do not be the cheapest guides be the best guides really guide your client up that mountain so now you're afraid to start and i really wanted to have more time to be interactive and when it's a smaller group we really do that so i still hope you still had a lot of fun i'd like you all to take out a piece of paper that you'll throw away and lose or open your laptop and i'd like you to write down as many things that you think you're going to implement and i know that you think oh i'm going to remember this i'll download the slide i'll ask or but you won't so just take a few notes of some things that you're going to implement when you get back that was meaningful to you are the things that you're going to research so i think it's going to be matrices it's going to be storyboards estimating managing client expectations doing minimal viable products who else has want something that they really liked from today yes uh-huh yeah yes yeah do feel free to go we're over if you'd like to stay um i can spend some a little time up here and we can continue talking if you have any specific case uses to you but did you guys find value from today yeah thank you yes hi this is a psa if you don't mind i lost my phone in the session before this anybody pick up a phone by chance hey so this is my friend johnny fox i just want to give him a plug because we did this session together and that's me yes um so i really like the uh storyboards yes and you thought of putting those icons up on like graphotopia or anything like that you know i don't really know how to do that but if you come talk to me i be happy to do it i'd like to use them um but quick question so are though like what would the difference be between those and like a flowchart or activity diagram like besides it being a little bit more visual probably with clients like can see would respond to it better just for having that extra visual element yes because it's it's for yeah i would say a little bit more time consuming right so if i'm just building if i just want to build a uml activity diagram lot not as pretty but maybe faster to build right yeah so flow diagrams i think flow diagrams tell something about logic where this is more of an end user's workflow through the Drupal site so it's slightly different because it's not giving them logic points it's saying i'm going to get my car drive to the store pick up bread pick up eggs pick up milk i'm going to come back make scrambled eggs toast where the flow diagram might say get in the car yes no if yes then this um is the road clear behind me so it's slightly different and it doesn't tell the user's experience with the site and that workflow becomes useful because some of those storyboards i went through a little complex and what it did is that it allowed me as a salesperson to not sell something that the engineer didn't sign off on and so that's really helpful like how many of you engineers love that i said you could do it yes i really liked the flowchart that you were talking about we actually have used omni-graphyl in the past and it's fantastic for once or in the project uh one of the things that we struggle with is the discrepancy between what's sold quote unquote when it's sold to the client and then what is explained from the client to PM or right engineers do you have any ideas for how to do that in the business development in the sales process so that things like once we get into you know wireframes like oh by the way my boss reminded me that we have this database that we fully need to right migrate into yeah so the storyboards that's a really good question so the storyboards are actually happening when we're doing the the preliminary conversations as pre-sales yeah because um that's how we actually know how to bid out the project because all the workflow is there we know all the content types it actually takes a little bit more time and money but the client really likes the process and we almost always win the project so it gives them a lot of faith that you understand what's going on with their business so they really like it and it gets to be alarmingly fast because you use the same 10 pages really and you're just moving the little icons around and changing the narrative down the right side so i have my account manager actually sit in on the sales meetings when we get to that point and then she just does them so they're not even coming from very um it's not coming from engineering it's coming from the sales side of things and so how many here do sales like it's a really powerful sales tool like if you if you're interviewing for shops who are you gonna hire the person that like maybe sometimes they'll hire someone that did a pretty mock-up but someone that walked them through their own idea is they feel very connected to anything else yes so when you have a client that one thing that resonated with me where where they want to talk through every change they want to be involved it's easier to set those expectations beforehand yes but you don't always know right what how they're going to be so so do you try to account for that in your meetings beforehand or do you just have to sit down with them and they might say well you didn't tell me we weren't going to you do kind of know because if they if someone hires you on the first meeting after a short time that's a bad thing right like they don't even know what they're buying if they if you have to come back for five meetings that's too much too remember that one slide that says too much too little it's like neither of things are those things are good and you can tell because they start to have really detailed emails to you and they they start like needing a lot of narrative so you kind of get a feel for it but it should just be part of your normal thing that says this is our typical meeting schedule like we have a sprint we have a kickoff we have a client meeting it lasts us long we expect to communicate with you daily through base camp and then just kind of set that that's the expectation and then at the end of the next sprint if they've been over communicative you can talk about that say hey I see that your project is being very account management heavy do you need me to assign more resources to that and we can just add that to your project yeah so yes let them know they're being resource heavy right like that's a really nice way of saying quit taking so much of my time and I think I'll too especially for those of you in universities the more formulaic you can make your meetings and your process for developing a site that's safer you'll be anything else yes oh you guys are so great thanks for hanging out I wonder if you could talk about the RFP process a little bit because to me RFP is recipe for problems yeah clients that way but that that doesn't seem to be the way that a lot of interesting work comes out it does how many of you have been successful with RFPs huh that's that's a really high number so turn it you guys should support my theories so I don't like RFPs and I'll tell you why they're either predisposed to already somebody already working in it and institutions have to put out RFPs but they already know who they're going to hire especially if it's very droopily like if it's like we need 12 content types and 14 views and blah blah blah it's like you already know Drupal something's going on or if they're so vague they don't know any Drupal and so it's not going to work either um I haven't found RFPs good because they tend to be fixed bid and unfortunately they don't pay for discovery and then you get in there and find out there were 24 things that they didn't mention in the RFP that you are now responsible for and so it's really tough and it's one of those opportunity costs um some people are brilliant at them and they can kind of structure RFPs to work for them I get annoyed by having to do them so I would rather go find work with people who want to work with me in my city where I can see them and meet with them than chase RFPs far away my success rate in closing a project where they're in my city is very high my success rate with RFPs is very low so if that helps yeah hi this is I'm glad this is my last session because this is my favorite oh thank you um yeah cool um so I really wanted to ask you when you talk about uh the pixel perfect client that gets hung up on design and I the way that my shop works and our team works we're I think we do a very good job of you know our design happens very late in the process nice um it but how I really want to know from a realistic standpoint like how late do you actually start and how do you I feel like in a lot of projects I spend the first three weeks telling the client why it's okay that they're not going to see a design yes in until six months from now yeah seven or eight months from now but what's some of the tips or techniques you use to reassure them that it's okay we're not going to see anything pretty for a very long time yeah it's a very different thing and especially like I will say at least now people don't ask for a design as part of the estimating proposal but I think you're the strongest asset because I think you're you're probably very creative is showing them the portfolio and say this is the way we work it's very successful and it saves you a lot of time and money usually people will cave when they say we can do this now but you're going to have to pay me to redo it several times and I have found this way to be so there's a feel felt found I understand how you feel others my other clients have felt the same way but what we found is that this is the most successful way to have a project because they're everyone feels afraid and alone like I didn't quite get into all of this but the reason clients are so difficult is because they're afraid they're terrified they're terrified it's like me planning a summit to Everest for all of you I would be terrified because I'm going to kill you and so it's not a good day and they feel the same way they're responsible for something they've probably never done before they have no expertise in they have to trust you and their jobs on the line their reputations on the line so yes the feel felt found is a really good way to do that oh I also think the second I don't think people talk about money soon enough yeah as soon as you can be equalizing and say if we do this this is the dollar amount like this will cost you actually these dollars then all of a sudden they're very comfortable about talking about exactly they won't actually do that then yeah exactly exactly well thank you you're welcome you're welcome anybody else uh so I just quickly so um you did mention sprint and agile yes scum and all that but then earlier on you're talking about leave design to the end so no I'm not an agile purist but no me neither um so how but how so if if I wasn't agile purist I would say well you're not producing uh releaseable features them right because they're not themed right um and then the reason I asked that is because you know like we always bend the rules or whatever in our projects where okay we're building the functionality and then do we create separate user stories for the theming part of it and where do they come in sprint but then I always struggle because there's that part of me that's reading all this theory around agile is saying um we're not producing production ready software then okay um so how do you here let me get to that slide that has all the stuff on it you understand what I'm saying in terms of the struggle a little bit yes so I I need to I guess my point is if we leave design to the end is that are we still being agile in that in that case yes and okay so let's look at this so what happens is that see where development and design are four and five they're really four a and four b they're happening in tandem so while the engineering team goes off and builds the design team now starts designing and working with the client on design and what it's actually really helpful is a little bit of a magician's trick like you worked through all the discovery and now your engineering team is in sprints and then you show them shiny thing shiny thing come over here let's look at pixels and colors now and they quit bothering you around engineering so you can build something and so it's a really good way that you have design and development now happening in tandem and then theming happens when design and development are done so once they've approved all the designs engineering is done sometimes one happens slightly before the other but they really take about usually the same amount of time and then they accept all of the functionality and sign off on that the designs and cons are ready to go and then you theme and one two sprints like there's nothing else really going on qa documentation bug fixes but you're theming during that time and then the site's ready to go it's really effective so it's a little bit separating out theming from design yes yes they're completely separate theming happens when everything else is done and not until then that's the magic like that's where you really have this the margins anything else you guys have been so awesome thank you for hanging out it was really fun come talk to me and don't forget about your free free account at getpantheon.com and then you can talk to him about top self modules if you want to know more about that