 Nice, so this is D-Till, she's been here before and she's actually from here. Next, Patrick Kiwi. D was actually, when I lived in Australia, it was the first Kiwi that I met in WordPress and it was so nice to hear the accent till I realised it was ruined by the Melbourne time you spent there. She's always happy to put in and help us out in the community. She's a colleague as well, so a project manager at Human Man. She's a huge fan of the WordPress community. She organises events in Australia and New Zealand and gets to speak, well, all the time. She recently spoke at WordCamp Europe. D drives a classic English car, owns a Burmese cat and drinks black coffee. So put your hands together and welcome D. Good, thank you, Tara. I really, really, really love coming back to New Zealand to speak at WordCamps. I've been away a really long time so I have to ask your forgiveness, I guess, for the Australianisms that have crept into my accent. But to be fair, I came back a week ago to visit with family so hopefully it's slightly less Australian than normal. I had a chance to revitalise my accent and get perhaps a little bit more acclimatised. I am known around the web actually as the web princess. I spend a really, really long time as a freelancer. But I am in New Zealand and that's actually a picture of me in Auckland. And I'm actually not sure you guys might be able to tell me a bit of the meat. That's either from the top of Mount Eden or the top of Wontree Hill. I can never actually remember but that's me on the left. It's Mount Eden, there you go. And my little sister on the right. My grandparents lived in Mount Eden and I know Auckland really well and have lived here myself. But right now I've been in Australia for 18 years. There are only four of those in Melbourne. But I work currently as a project manager for Human Made. Now that's quite a transition. I haven't always been a project manager. I used to be a front-end developer but I was really crap at it. Well actually, in the context I wasn't actually. I turned out a lot of really good sites. But in terms of a programmer, I was a really, really good take other people's code and improve it. And in my journey of wanting to increase the kind of work I was doing, increase the value that I was getting paid for the work I was doing, I made a transition about 18 months ago and kind of pivoted what I was doing into project management. And so what I want to talk to you about today is actually some of the lessons that I've learned in project management that are applicable not just to people in freelancing who are managing projects themselves. There's a lot of us on our own managing a whole project and a whole client. But also some of these things can actually apply to the projects in life as well. And so that's how I ended up here talking to you in this slot because hopefully it's something that crosses not just development but also other areas as well. So for how many of you is this a familiar feeling? Paralyzing incapacitating dread of the amount of stuff that you have sitting on your desk ready to do? Anybody? Anybody relate? What about this one here? I rather suspect that this guy sitting there with the client on the other end of the phone trying to explain to him why the project's not running on time, why he's going over budget. And it's tough when you've got other people relying on you and you're juggling their needs as well as juggling your own. Don't you just wish you could say, I can stay here talking to you or I can get on with the job? Of course, we're nice. We're not going to do that and we value our clients and we want to keep them. But that feeling of dread and overwhelm around the pressures that we have, or this one, there's just so much coming at you that it's really, really hard to keep your handle on all of that you have to deliver with all of the other things that you're trying to do. And certainly having spent so much time freelancing myself trying to keep on top of all of the moving parts because you're not always just working on one job. You might have three or four different jobs that you're working on at any one time. You might have a dozen maintenance clients that you have to deal with as well. So in this session, we're going to talk about some of the simple ways that I've learned in managing large projects to break stuff down and organize what you need to do to save or even make time and to get back to that feeling of having made order out of chaos. Some of these tips may help you manage some of the projects in your freelance business. Some of them may even be applicable in managing personal projects like organizing a renovation, planning a wedding, getting travel details down, anything really. So we're going to actually look at seven aspects of project management, I guess, that I've come across that can be applied in more than just the project management space. They are analyze, visualize, prioritize, iterate, complete, celebrate, and reflect. And I know what you're sitting there thinking, you go, holy crap, there's seven of them. Too many, too hard, overwhelm, overwhelm, and I'm so sorry about that. Don't panic. This is under seven-step program. Just as we're all different and different things cause different kinds of stress, hopefully there may be one or two simple takeaways from the whole big picture that may be able to help regardless of whether you're working in a team or whether you're working on your own. You don't have to apply them all at once to see useful gains in some of the parts of the projects and stuff that you're working on. For me, the biggest stressor in life in general is feeling out of control. I'm a fairly A-type personality. I'm the oldest of four. I've always been the one that has to try and keep the handle on things. And so when things feel out of control, that's when I start to feel anxious and stressed. It may be different for other people. So hopefully there'll be something here that will help. And if you're already familiar of working in project management or terms like agile and scrum are familiar, I'm not really talking about, in this case, applying a particular framework. There are little pieces, I guess, out of some of those frameworks that have come out of that. So there'll be principles that are familiar to Agilists. But for anyone wanting a deep dive into that, that's a talk for another day. It's actually probably a completely different conference. So let's look at pillar number one, Analyze. So if you're anything like me, when you pick up a new project, you just get excited about it. You want to dive in. But an actual fact, spending a little bit of time at the top of that project may really help you plan better to get a bigger picture idea of what you need to do. It will help project around the timing of some of the parts of that project that you need to take on. And it will help project, I guess, how long it may take things to take. So if, I know for me, I would find I'd grab a new project. There's elements about it that would be the same on a repeating basis. And so I'd have a fair idea about what was going on, particularly if it's a small to medium business website that has fairly static needs, contact page about page, all of those kind of informational type pages that don't have a huge demand or a huge amount of use cases that need some challenging time to work through. But other projects are not quite so straightforward. So maybe actually sitting down and breaking the whole of the project down into all of its moving parts could be really helpful. So the first analysis that I do when we're working on a project, whether it's a large scale project, there's a small one, is to sit down and what create or what we would call a backlog. It's basically a to-do list. Sitting down and breaking down all of the pieces of the puzzle that you're wanting to put together into small parts. And we can see here, here's a fairly small project around doing maintenance or planning your maintenance for a particular client. We can see I've got checklists on there. This is just a spreadsheet. We've got the other thing that I've done that can actually be quite helpful is estimating the effort of all of the parts that you need to get done. Not because that's a measure of time, but it gives you a measure against each other to be able to see here's the piece that's actually going to take the most amount of work. That's going to need more time applied to it. Here's a piece that's so big that I actually need to spend some time breaking this down even further and making that into smaller parts. And we use those kind of effort points quite a lot in terms of measuring how much we have achieved throughout the course of a project or the course of a sprint, which we'll talk about shortly, but we also use that to predict how much more work we have coming up, how we need to resource that as well. So if we look away from a work-related project to a home-related project, you can actually apply the same principles. Actually, sitting down, writing down the list of all of the parts of that project, having a look at which parts of it are going to take the most amount of effort and being able to assess how you bring, potentially bring somebody else in to help with that part of the project can also be quite useful. Here's a thing. You may feel like you don't have time to be sitting around thinking about and pulling apart the project you're about to embark on. But the thing that I've found is that by doing this, at the top of the project, it actually helps smooth things out. It helps manage the expectations. For me, as somebody who likes to feel in control, it actually helps feel like I care and know what I'm up against. I know what I have to plan for. The other thing that's really useful if you're structuring something like this is that if you're doing projects that all have similar basic needs, you can actually set this up as a template and then reuse it and adjust it for other projects as they come along. This part visualizing some of those elements of the project that you're doing is actually my favorite part. Sounds kind of weird, but let me show you some of the different ways of visualizing the workload in a project. You can do it to-do list. I'm not completely sure about keeping the list on your hand, but at its most basic, a list and a bunch of checkboxes against that list can just be incredibly valuable in getting all of those ideas out of your head knowing exactly what's coming up and being able to plan for that. You probably don't need me to tell you this I'm pretty sure all of us have written lists at different times. How many of you are familiar with something like this? Awesome. This is a Kanban board or a Kanban board and it's pretty much my favorite way of organizing work to-do. It's a to-do list. It's so simple and straightforward. It's a sharpie. It's a whole bunch of post-its. It's a list of jobs that you need to do and it's a workflow in a really, really simple, easy way. I have a board like this in my office and my office, the wall behind my office with my sticky notes on it. I actually get grief from my team. We do a whole lot of virtual meetings. I get grief from my team if they're not seeing the board change. Hey Dee, what have you done? That was last week. What's going on? So I've actually got a whole lot of unwanted or unsolicited accountability partners and getting stuff done. I've got one of these in my office. I've got one of them in the kitchen and I've actually told my friends about it and now my sister's got a Kanban board on her fridge with a really, really long list of jobs that she's achieved and I've got a friend who's got one of these up at school. It's so simple and it's so easy that it's ridiculously valuable and if you take nothing away from this other than I need to go home and buy Post-its in a Sharpie I think it's a really great tool and this is one that's slightly more involved. You can see their backlog here on the left the cool, warm and hot this is the work that we've got coming up they're kind of graduating with it by priority you can see what's going on there's a lot more detail on the Post-it notes itself but you've got that column on the right that says this is done and you're actually seeing work move and that's actually really valuable of course you might not be someone who has enough wall to be able to put a whole lot of Post-its on it so there's actually digital tools that will give you exactly that same effect this is Trello how many of you guys are familiar with Trello? How many? Awesome I find sorry I keep hitting the mic I find it's too easy for me to hide Trello and close it and not keep coming back to it which is why the Post-it notes really work for me but if you're the kind of person that's going to have this open all the time I can see what's going on I can set deadlines on this I'm going to get reminders when a ticket needs doing obviously it's a little harder to collaborate on a whiteboard if you're the only person in the office I don't know how many of you have worked in large enterprise offices we're seeing the more and more time I spend in a big office the more and more I'm seeing Post-it notes go up all over the boards there but this is another way of doing it Trello's free so you can actually get a huge amount of benefit out of it for little or no outlay how many of you have worked with Asana before a few less people so Asana is also a project management tool it's a little bit like Basecamp and that's a really structured easy to manage to-do list with checkboxes again you can invite people into it you can put as much or as little detail as you like it's basically they call it basically a really fancy to-do list the board thing is a challenge but you prefer a linear list here's one way of looking at it here's a more detailed view of a Trello board of an Asana project you can see they've got them organised by date there's calendar items you can see the details you can put to-do list you can assign tasks left, right and centre particularly great for operating with clients and actually inviting clients into Asana as well it's one of the most basic applications that's more expensive as you start to invite more and more people into it but I think you can have a team of 15 people without it costing you any money so the other thing that Asana have recently introduced is boards as well so if you prefer that board layout but you still really like to use Asana you can actually set your project up as a board as well finally if you're managing all of the issues for a development project a get hub backlog basically just get hub standard list of issues with a few tags on it but the other tool that's really really useful if you're doing everything in get hub is called Zen Hub which is an overlay and a browser extension basically for crime I'm not sure if it's available in other browsers but it actually gives you a bunch more options to actually help manage the project with all of the work that's in get hub and we've used this one I mean if you've worked in enterprise you will have heard of Jera and a whole lot of other kind of really big picture these help particularly with smaller projects to give that same kind of feel of the big picture or the big enterprise software without the big enterprise software price Zen Hub is free for open source projects or for open repos but it's paper seat for private repos a few years other tools I'd love to hear about that when we get to Q&A but these are the ones that I've found that are really accessible for people who are getting into entry level project management so we move on to prioritize this is probably one of the key two lessons I've taken away from all of the that shift I guess from development into project management if you want to know the first one come and find me in the break but for this one it's do what adds value first often I think with small and medium business or freelancers we tend to operate in what's called a waterfall fashion we start with this bit we can't do the next bit until that bit's done we can't do this bit until that bit's done until we get to the end of the project and we can then show the client the completed website and send them the invoice for the second half of the account we're going to talk when we get into the next pillar of iteration a little bit of an alternate kind of way that you can do that in terms of getting into iterative development but often a client will say I need to have a website it needs to do all of these things it needs to have this it needs e-commerce but we'll look at that big picture and go we're going to build the whole thing instead of thinking our client has a bricks and mortar store we can immediately get him more money by creating a landing page with his address and his phone number to actually start thinking not just in terms of my job of getting this website finished but in thinking in terms of my client needs to make money so we can afford to pay my bill at the end of the website are there any ways when we look at this project to actually start adding value to him early on and what you start seeing getting produced in this is a lot more of a collaborative approach to developing with a client you're actually bringing the client in and going hey I can offer you this that's going to help really add value to your business it's going to give you some early money in this process and all at once you become this you're not just the contractor that's building his website you're a partner with him in his business so there's a couple of things that that does it makes you a really really valuable asset to the client it's giving you a huge amount of capital when the client's going hey I got this guy to do my website, this girl to do my website and they were amazing because not only did they just build me a website they actually helped me build my business so over and over again if I'm sitting there looking at the project and I'm collaborating with our client who is setting a lot of the priority of the parts of the project that we're building first, the thing that he's always thinking about is what's going to give us the most bang in this moment and it may not be money it may be this is going to really help the stakeholders in my office be able to see where we're going to give him some more capital to be able to go back to some of the other stakeholders and say yes we're on this part of the project we're on this track this is really going to help us here there's just all of these things that actually really help having that mindset of what's going to add the value in this moment yeah it's almost become a mantra I'm sitting there looking at this thing what's going to add the value first it's incredible and so this was where we start thinking about we're setting that priority we're iterating again we can't as often as solo freelancers we come with this picture of building this whole thing rather than let's change the approach so if you consider a project of building a car you can build the parts like this hey I have a wheel you're showing it to the client the client's like this is doing nothing for me I have two wheels client store like this is not helping me get where I want to go until you get all the way to the end and you go here's your car and then the client's like oh that's exactly what I wanted whereas if we change our mindset to a more iterative mindset we can start with a skateboard and the client goes I can see the value of this it's going to get me from A to B it's not slick it's not cool but it does the job and you can keep working through that process and collaborating and talking through with the client continually building on what you're starting with now this is a kind of big head shift I guess particularly if you're doing small business websites but again it's coming back to building what adds value first and then iterating and making things more I was going to say more slick but making and adding and continuing to add value because what you can find you may find if you were building a product for a client if you were building a vehicle for a client he may get to the point at number four and go you know what this thing that we've made this motorbike that we've made has a unique space in this market and this is actually going to deliver a whole lot more value for my business than if we go on and create the sports car that's the same as every other sports car so when you're looking at iterative development and you're in collaboration with the client you actually got a lot more room to be flexible than if you go we're building your website and this is what the website's going to look like at the end if we're having those conversations if you're partnering with the client and doing a lot more collaborative and iterative iteratively you got a lot more social capital a lot more capital with the client you've got a lot more flexibility now for some of us that sounds like a dream and other people it probably sounds like a nightmare but if he's thinking not just in terms of what you're doing but also what you're doing for the client it can be quite a head chef in fact Henryk Nieberg the guy that actually came up with that diagram has gone on from this most viable product or minimum viable product diagram that we saw to an earliest testable product so again we're involved with the client we're showing prototyping we're showing working software to the client all throughout the process and that can be incredibly valuable in his tag aim for the clouds but deliver in small steps the benefit for you and all of this satisfy clients more referrals more projects more cash in the bank you know at its most basic so one of the tenets of Agile is the best measure of success is working software and you can see how that kind of plays through that MVP that iterative type process but if you start getting interested in project management and researching the different methodologies it can get pretty overwhelming I was at a conference recently where I heard one of the original progenitors of the Agile manifesto talking about getting back to the heart of Agile which is collaborate, deliver, reflect and improve those are the most important parts of Agile project management realistically everything that we've covered in the talk already touches on that in one area or another but completing and actually finishing not just the whole of the project but the bits and the things that you're ticking off your list are incredibly valuable again with that social capital with the client with the value to the client so when we're looking at our backlog or our list of items that we have to do we are measuring our items against what we call a definition of done and I'll show you what our definition of done looks like it will be different for other people but it's hugely satisfying to get to the end of a sprint now we operate in two weeks sprints and a sprint is a set measure of time where we go here's the number of backlog items that we think that we're going to be able to get done to achieve this particular goal in this stretch of time and at the end of that sprint we'll have a meeting with the client and we'll show them all of the work that we've achieved that's where the completion part comes in we're having these regular collaborative sessions with the client and they can see what we're actually doing we just finished a sprint unfortunately we didn't get through all of the work that we wanted to do through a whole bunch of other factors some of which were client related some of which were our time related but we showed them all of the parts that we'd worked on in that period that met the definition of done and we still came away with the client going thumbs up, great job lots of us and ours that you get throughout the process and they're starting to see their vision come to pass through your work it's really cool so this is our definition of done the feature or the story has been coded it's been tested by the team in collaboration with our product owner which is our representative which is the client basically representative in our team it's unit tested, it's reviewed it's been released to the staging environment and the product owner and the external testers have been able to go over it test it and see that it's work and in our Kanban board and our Scrum board only the tester or the product owner is allowed to move the tickets into the done column when he says they're done, then they're done and when they're in the done column we can actually showcase it or review it at the end of the review which brings me to the next pillar which is celebrate now this doesn't actually mean get out cake and candles and have a party every time we do a sprint review but when we have a sprint review of every sprint we have an opportunity for the client to see obviously what we're doing, to get excited about what we're doing and there's a huge amount of satisfaction for our team in going, yeah we really succeeded in that sprint we achieved what we needed to achieve and we know where we're going next celebrate might be a little bit of a word but it kind of sounded good with the rest of the list but actually having that moment of recognition that we've done a really good job that we're working well together that we're achieving what the client wants is really important and having that feedback from the client is really important and finally, pillar number seven is reflect this is one of the core parts of agile is actually looking at what you're working on and looking at where what you've done can help you improve into what you're coming next so we have a meeting at the end of every sprint called a retrospective or retro and these are the questions that we ask this is another meeting that if you're in physical space you can actually do with post-it notes and three panels on the board what went well, what didn't go well what are we going to do next and you spend 10 or 15 minutes with everybody sitting down with their post-its and sharpies putting them all on the board and then go through each of those things with the group with the whole focus being what went well we did great at this, let's keep doing this what didn't go well this needed some work so what, breaking it down what didn't go well, what we'd like to work on for next time, how we can improve that process to make it better in the future and then a list of action items will usually come out of that meeting this is a meeting that we don't have this with the client we don't give the client the opportunity to go you mess this up, you mess this up, you mess this up and this was really good for me to work on and that's really, really, really helpful so even in a personal projects, I think it's entirely possible to use this kind of reflective process of going, okay, so I've achieved this time block I've got all of those things done how did that work, what worked well, what could be done better is valuable but if nothing else comes out of this I have two things what adds value first it may be that adding value in your personal projects is something that will give you more time with your family so if you're looking at the thing and go the important value for me right now is spending more time with my family, what about my projects can I do now that's going to give me that and actually work on that it may be more time with your other half it may be more time to contribute to the community, it may be more time what is the thing that's going to add value for you in this moment and work on that the other one is buy stock and post-its I wish I'd known what was going to happen with Agile and post-its like five years ago because the number of post-its that I see in any given project room or any different clients is off the chain, it's awesome so here in this lesson I have a list of further reading and I'll make the slides available so that you guys can get hold of that if you're interested but this is the point at which I am now open for questions does anybody have any questions Matthew when you have freelancers involved in a project for your reflection thing, do you have any tips about dealing with a bunch of freelancers around the project? so if you have freelancers sure, yes if you have freelancers and getting them involved in collaborating with you on a project do you manage some of that reflection? I think all of these elements around managing a team in an agile way would help at the top of the project whereas so we have a set calendar basically that makes our sprints look exactly the same and so we have that meeting and it's setting up at the top, here's how we work here's how we manage our backlog here's what our time schedule is going to look like and Retro would be part of that and it's setting that up on board with the freelancers that know okay so when I'm working with Matthew or with Dee or with any of these teams these are what the expectations are going to be these are what my meeting schedule is going to look like and this is what I have to contribute to that meeting and so it becomes part of how you set up the culture of that workload actually will lead into that one of the things I didn't talk about was the meeting that we have called a stand up so when we're working in a team situation we have a very short meeting called a stand up once a day the whole team gets involved and there were three questions that get asked in that meeting what did you do yesterday to bring us closer to our sprint goal what are you going to do today and that arching to bring us closer to our sprint goal and what roadblocks do you have because what we're doing is bringing in a team mindset this is not just a bunch of individual freelancers all of a sudden now we're part of a team we have a goal that we're working towards and asking those questions A brings them in and makes them part of the team it gives each other an opportunity to say when somebody says I have a roadblock here I'm struggling to figure this bit out because I don't know enough backbone to get that little bit figured out that we're doing another team members an opportunity to say I'm a backbone legend I can help you with that let's set aside 20 minutes so that I can download into you what you need and so it actually starts creating a team vibe it's not just a bunch of random freelancers that are coming in and doing that there can be a challenging thing to do if it's all just short term guys coming and your guys and girls coming and going I'm just going to do this and we're only here involved in that but I think we have the opportunity to create that kind of culture and actually you're helping set them up as they go on and do other things and work on other projects and if people have a trajectory around their career and if they're wanting to go from small projects, individual stuff into enterprise you're actually helping them set them up into that as well Ralph So when you have a definition of done did you dirt yourself or did you discuss it with your customer and if you did do you have the different definitions of done for your customer? The customer came up with the definition of done actually so in our project that's the customer because the project that we're currently working on we're a small part of a team doing a WordPress element in a much much bigger project and so they're setting the definition of done for the whole project and we have to meet that so the other thing that they have around that definition of done is also what is called acceptance criteria so we'll have a ticket that has the description about what's involved in that ticket and what's needed for that and then the acceptance criteria is the checklist of all of the things that have to be met to reach before we can say it's done so it could be the ticket could be creating the shopping cart for an e-commerce site and then the criteria will be can put an address can check out as guest can do all of these things and when it's checked off it goes to testing and when it goes to testing and the client can go yes I can test against all of these then it moves into the definition of done so starting to get into kind of bigger picture territory but in our case it's always been in this project it's the client that's set that because it's actually part of a much much bigger project Nick I like that you're going to wait for the mic just help for the recording approach if that's how you say iterative and I can see how it works with larger projects but for small projects dealing with small businesses with a limited budget and they may have a website up or they may not have a website up so to deliver a minimum viable sort of product like usually a project might take say six weeks or something but it's always about cash they need to get cash in the business the reason why they're getting a new website up is to get more leads in the money in the business and usually the time frame is like sign up the project design, develop, deliver so how would you see in small projects like that delivering a minimum viable product and having some approach there that actually gets some runs on the boards during that whole process it's probably going to vary from client to client and in actual fact having those conversations early conversations with the client what's your biggest need I have a brick and mortar store I need people in the door so MVP from that may not even be design MVP may be a white website optimized for Google to get local traffic to then with you know address and phone number and clickable phone links so that somebody can pick up their phone, Google plumbing in downtown Auckland and actually get that because at the end of the day the most important information for somebody who's looking for a plumber in downtown Auckland because all of a sudden they've got flooding because it's rained all week that's business for the client even if the website is just black text on a white website I'm not suggesting that I think that becomes part of the conversation with the client and I understand that you know in a small or medium business a waterfall approach just has to be what we're doing but you know there's elements around that that I go you could totally develop a landing page a landing page that's optimized for Google with those kind of information on it even just to get them started to start getting some of those runs on the board it's not something is there anybody else in the room that's actually come across that kind of approach or an innovative approach in small business a small website Matt about four or five steps step one, Google My Business is it set up, is it claimed to do that photos if they do try and get a review start rating on Google My Business is the number one ranking signal really for local traffic on Google so that's not even a website that's not even any development that's just marketing just check the Google My Business second one check the Facebook if there's anything blocking anything or if there's any duplicate listings across both those channels if all those are good then start on the one page get that up as quickly as possible and then start on the five to ten page small business website that's it awesome so I have one more question or zero, awesome that's it, thanks guys awesome