 So good morning. I hope all of you have taken time to see some of the amazing art in this building and at the Belvedere This is an amazing city. This is my first trip to Europe. I've spent two weeks looking at some amazing things You guys live in a wonderful place I'm from Chicago And I've been doing WordPress for a long time and I'm really involved with the local community there And if you're ever in Chicago, you should come check out my meetup, but let's talk about project management Who is the project manager? Oh, I didn't mean that Who who's a developer here? right, okay, and Some of you are project managers, etc All of you are project managers if you're working on a smaller project and it's just you and the site owner Who's the project manager? You are If you're working in a bigger group and there's a designated project manager, and you're still the developer You're still the project manager. Don't tell them that Somebody needs to keep things moving. Somebody needs to put all of the pieces together. Somebody needs to hear all of the voices Right, so it can be a designated person. It can be a team member But as my friend Rachel said a few years ago Developer you are the project manager. You are the final person making this magic happen So you have to be able to keep things together skills in project management Managing expectations This is the biggest thing which means communication which means spelling things out which means being stupidly detailed You may understand how this works the people you're working with may not you need to manage the expectations So they know what they're getting into you need to be Completely proactively organized If you're not a maniac about file management, maybe project management is not for you You have to be able to be organized And documentation You can do it in a lot of different ways and we'll look at some ways further down But you absolutely have to keep things on track and in some kind of documentation and excessive patience Lots and lots of patience leads to less aggravation There are a lot of kitty pictures in this presentation. This one is mine. I Don't walk her with the dog So what does a project manager do You outline the steps you make sure that things get put together in the right way you set the timelines the deadlines This is really important timelines are often fluid But having a group calendar where you can all see oh, this is the day We need to make some decisions or this is the chunk of time We have to add content is very very valuable You create an agenda for any meeting any call And what I don't have here is that you then follow that up with some documentation with action points I decided to do this you decided to do that We're gonna do it together and we're gonna do something else on Thursday You have to have those action points anybody here been to a Meeting that went on for four hours and we talked about our kids in the weather I Walked out of one with six people with a project manager and a Facilitator and at the end of the meeting the writer and I looked each other and she says now what are we supposed to do? This is not a good meeting Right meetings are to get stuff done have an agenda make some decisions You need to get the right people involved. I Work as a solopreneur But I hire people as I need them when I get a bigger project and I've been blessed with some pretty nice big ones I I need more people. I need a UX person. I need a content person I need you know another designer another developer or whatever you need to know how to get those people together Project manager does not need to be part of every discussion. I Really don't want to spend four hours with you and your distribution person trying to figure out how much to charge for Shipping and handling on an $8 item And I wouldn't tell that story if it actually hadn't happened to me And then he's like, oh, we need to have another conversation. It's like you have the conversation All I need is the dollar amount to put into the cart So you don't need to know everything you just need to know what the outcomes were You need to keep things on track Everyone in a project has their own point of view. What's important to them? The owner has this vision or maybe not The editors are very clear on what they want their content to look like There are lots of different players going on you need to sit down and talk to as many of these people as possible Ahead of time before these big group meetings to try and get an idea of where they're coming from Because you're the one who's going to put this all together Those group of people are going to have lots of skills. They're going to have their own agenda Right We've all heard about those websites where the front page had to include everyone's favorite piece Everyone's got their own agenda. So you need to be clear on that and then make sure that you're you're making some decisions here So who are the players the clients? The owner who walks on water Makes you have to get them involved early They are not going to be there for all of the meetings They are not going to be there for all the decision-making But you want them to buy in to the the overall point of view early the editors These ladies well the in my case the editors of all bin ladies are very very particular about what their content is and what it should look like and Are the technical people for the subject matter? You have to respect that you have to give them a layout and other things that will work for them and you have to deal with varying personalities and The office staff This is the last group that always gets forgotten But when something doesn't work in the cart when something doesn't work in the flow of registration These are the ladies that have to take care of it So get to know these ladies Have them help you With what they're seeing and what they're doing have them go through the process of buying something of Registering for something so that they understand when a client complains about something what steps they needed to have taken This is a very important group of people make friends and then the other set of players the designer Who may or may not know the technology you may or may not know web design But we need to listen to them an I a UX Hopefully knows the technology, but maybe not the IX I UX I worked with it had no idea what WordPress could do or didn't do It was actually kind of freeing because she was like you need to do this and I was like Can WordPress do that? Oh, yeah, let's go find out. So it can be good and Then of course the developer were the ones who put it all back together and make that magic happen Keeping it all together and keeping it all on track Would that it were this simple? So what kind of tools can you use? I use base camp. I have looked at Trello I've not used it a lot, but a lot of people like it sharing documents in a common cloud space Google Drive or Dropbox Very very important, you know, you don't want to have 16 copies of something running around on everyone's machine Just have a local. This is the project folder. This is all the subfolders. This is where the art goes This is where the content goes and everyone can see it right keep it all together and email Calendars I'm a big fan of setting up a shared Google calendar for a project that is just shared with the people on the project And then everyone can see those timelines that we're shooting for Or are those drop-dead deadlines that we must meet? Do take the time if you're setting up Dropbox or Drive or base camp to walk the clients through how to use the tools Doesn't do any good if they don't Understand how to do something and in conclusion It really is all politics. You have to be nice to these people all the time You have to take things down. You have to be empathetic and compassionate and Get everybody what they want in a nice way You absolutely need to be prepared. You absolutely need to be organized and if something went wrong take a look Okay, how could I do that better next time? We always are learning. No project is perfect. No project is ever done You know, so we keep learning how to do it and have fun so See I kept this nice and sure for you guys. I have lots of time for questions. There you go