 Okay, welcome. Thanks for coming. I am Gonna try really hard not to pace I've told people before I usually walk around when I talk So if I drift away from the mic, then you guys really have to throw things at me or make me stop I'm also a little bit of a little bit crazy and I talk fast And I know there's a lot of non English speakers in the audience So if I'm talking too fast for you just raise your hand and say slow down or shout out slow down And I I've been married for many years now and I take criticism very well. So just shout it out and I'll behave Okay, so I'm gonna talk about good projects and I I start with the Mindset that a project can be great. And so over the past 20 years We've been doing all different processes. We've tried all different sorts of ways to make good projects Now what we found is when projects fail, they tend to fail for one of four reasons Most of what I'm going to talk about today falls into the bad process Category and that's because those other three things can be solved by a good process and And so that doesn't mean they're they're trivial and I'll talk about them all and if you have questions about any of them specifically let me know the other thing I want to say is I'm American and we're kind of obnoxious I don't know if you know that about us, but we're a little obnoxious sometimes I've been told in Europe people are a lot more polite and don't necessarily ask questions or shout out I'm just gonna say that if you feel the urge to just act American Even if you're not and just like raise your hand or shout out a question in the middle of my talk Please feel free to I'm totally fine with that. So Okay, so For the past 19 years my wife and I've had a multimedia company based in Massachusetts, which is in the United States We do all sorts of fun stuff for all sorts of companies many of them. You've heard of many of them. You haven't heard of Right now. I'm actually on a one-year sabbatical. I'm living in Siena with my wife and my four kids and and The reason I'm here is because we have had so much success Removing waste from projects that when I see people kind of doing projects the way we did them five years ago Then I just feel really bad and I want to help people and and so I'm here just to kind of spread the word and I You know, I love doing this sort of stuff. I love craziness. I mean I mentioned I have four kids So obviously I have craziness you think that's hard, but it's actually really easy I mean, I it's actually very easy to have four kids My goal here is I want everyone in this audience to come away with three things that will make their life easier Three and they could be little things. I could save five minutes a day They could save five minutes a week But but my goal is to make sure everyone comes away with with three things And so if you don't have those three things get me afterwards And I will spend as much time as necessary to make sure that you learn something and you can apply something to your day-to-day life here So, yeah, you've heard about me great What about you? I just want to know kind of who's in the audience and so I'm gonna ask that most people only pick one thing sometimes you have to pick two But so I'm just gonna go through the list how many people here in a leadership position That's a lot. All right, that means you don't do anything. Okay now We'll get into all the people that actually do things How many people are logistics people they kind of keep things running on time. They keep things moving a Few a couple was that was like a half. We've got like four and a half. Okay How many people are communications marketing sales tech support? They're out there talking to people Okay, very few front-end. Oh, why did they click that front-end developers? How many people are front-end developers? Few okay, how many people are hardcore programmers That's what I expected them all to be. That's actually less than the leadership interesting I'm how do people are design anyone. There's like usually one. There's this is good We've got like eight. Okay, and how people are other how many people did I not cover there? You just want to shout out what you are a bit of everything. You'll choose other. Okay, that's fair An architect Devops architect nice It's about process So you're like Scrubbing the toilet and doing absolutely everything. Okay. Good. Good. Good Okay, so size of companies just so we have a feel for who's in the room and who's sitting next to you How many people are in companies over a thousand employees? Is that about 20% I'd say how many a hundred to ninety nine About 10% 15 to 99 Large percent maybe 40% two to four Teen sorry ha ha Few okay, and how many people are lone gunslingers and Just out of curiosity. It's like you really are there's like three of you So you're like you're like you're gonna have to have a shootout out in the hall or something How many people are part of the Drupal org organization anyone here got a few okay great Thank you for those of you that just raised your hand there. We appreciate it everyone in this room appreciates it size of projects and I'll have one more couple more slides this so we're don't worry How many people work on different projects practically every week? Okay sizable group okay different every quarter Okay, that looks like a little more than half and same thing all year long Okay, so they're slightly less, but it's a pretty much a third a third split. Okay So here's where you're gonna have to talk pretend you're American you're gonna have to shout some things out What are your favorite things about like why are you doing your job? What are your favorite things about doing your job? So someone shout out? What was that you like coding awesome? Designing good what else Problem-solving sorry challenging you like like the hardest things right? freedom Freedom integrating innovating other said integrating. I was gonna say you're like the only one I've ever met that likes it Database I like database merging yay And there probably is someone so if you're that person we all love you and we'd all like to hire you so don't feel bad I'm not teasing you okay, so The things that people usually miss when they go through this is people I'm so I mean no one shouted this out, but I'm sure you're all thinking you love the recap meeting You know here's what we did last week. We're gonna spend a week an hour talking about it as a group Or when we're when we're you know working on the project and we're like, you know, we're gonna change the functionality We're gonna change the look it's it's time to do that. We're on round seven of that I mean that when you get into the double digits that's where design revisions really get fun once he gets like 10 11 12 That's Or when the marketing director leaves I mean has anyone ever been in a project where a marketing director or the project or IT director or some key point person left Raise your hand if you have but halfway through a project the key person left. I mean, that's that's awesome, right, right? Change orders removing features. I mean, this is always cool I mean you you build this thing you've been stressing about it for months, right? And then at the last minute it's like, you know, we actually don't need that so all your stressors for nothing It's just a relief isn't it makes you feel good inside, right? Or those specs. I mean like the thicker the spec the better. I mean I I kind of Use weight as my criteria as to what's the best spec possible So, you know something we heard in the keynote is there's got to be a better way to a lot of these processes We're using now and and I thought this was a great great quote. We heard in the keynote also So I added this here. I mean we have to start with the assumption that We can't predict the future. I mean that's great Harry Potter There are some people that can predict the future but even that's kind of vague, right? I mean like you really wouldn't want to base a project plan on on Harry Potter's predictions of the future, right? I mean, you know Voldemort's gonna die in the last book, but other than that like who else is gonna die Okay, so and we need we need to change the way that we do things So I do have another question for all of you and I want to I want to ask this out there When you're sitting down and working in your day to day Which of these things are you actually adding value to and I'm not going to go through and necessarily do a show of hands But think about it like are you writing code because you're supposed to write code? Are you writing code for your boss? Are you writing codes that's in the spec? Are you writing code or configuring something or managing a project or doing whatever this other thing you're doing? Because you're adding some sort of tangible value and and and then the other question that that I think everyone should ask themselves at least I'm gonna say at least once a week But really you should ask yourself it every hour is In the past hour in the past day in the past week have I actually done anything that contributes to the Core thing I'm trying to solve or have I just been doing all of the busy work Because that's what you're supposed to do and that's the structure we put around a project and so About five or six years ago. We said well What if we just stopped doing all the stuff that wasted time and the inspiration for this does anyone know what? Habitat for Humanity is raise your hand if you've heard of it. It's a really great nonprofit organization in America and what happens is people go and volunteer in low-income places to help build houses and It's really really a fascinating thing and so we as a company have gone and volunteered multiple times. We've donated to them It's really rewarding. It's it's really fun But when we were working there We were realizing this fact that Habitat for Humanity can build a hundred houses in a week now these houses Pass code. They're they're not fire hazards. They're structurally sound people can live in them. They have plumbing They have electricity. I mean electricity starts fires and blows things up. They have gas They have all this dangerous stuff They have a whole bunch of people that don't know what they're doing and aren't wearing hard hats has been pointed out to me before Swinging hammers and nails and saws and they managed to build a hundred houses in one week and so Why is there ever a 12 month web project and and you know, I'm a little facetious because yes They're that has to happen But I think the first thing we have to acknowledge is there is a lot of waste in our system And how do we get rid of that waste? Okay? How many people are familiar with lean manufacturing? Kaizen or Toyota or anything like that. Okay, so this slide will will probably not be new to a lot of you But to the rest of you, this is pretty exciting. So What Toyota does is it says instead of trying to make our processes shorter What we should try to do is take the things that are a waste out of the process And so if you look at our process and this is just a rough approximation of what it might look like to design and build a Website if you look at it and you look at what truly adds value and Then you take out everything. That's not that. Okay, so it's not about making the project shorter It's not about cutting down on time. It's about focusing your time on the things that add value And so what would a project look like if we only did these four things? I mean now I mean think about it think about how much more rewarding your day would be think about how much more Successful the project would be and so you don't have recap meetings. You go live quickly It's okay not to know before you start because here's the thing We write these giant specs because we're afraid of not knowing But has anyone ever seen a spec that by the time you launch the project is actually the right thing for the project I mean, I've seen projects where the spec is implemented to spec But it's never actually been the right answer when that happens and more likely halfway through someone throws out the skip back And rewrites the spec And so we have to start with the assumption that we don't actually know what the right answer is and and so you can have Lots of different reactions to that right and so just out of curiosity I just look at Her and her I mean you have like It's it's fear and joy, right? And so just out of curiosity how many people right now as I'm talking are in the fear camp and be perfectly honest Raise your hand if you're in the fear camp right now as I'm saying this stuff. You got a few and they're all raising your hand halfway You can be bold I mean if you're in the fear camp just be like I am in the fear camp now How many people are in the excitement camp just out of curiosity? Okay, a few more and then I'm guessing the other people didn't raise their hands are either in a coma because they Just ate lunch or they're they're somewhere in between which is fine So here's the thing the thing we're afraid of is we're afraid to change we're afraid of risk We're afraid of doing something wrong and so There's a saying which is you never get fired for hiring IBM and The theory behind that is if you hire IBM and they mess up and your boss calls you into the office and says that project Was horrible you can turn around and say well. I hired IBM They're like the best company in the world that system integration It wasn't my fault and you and you keep your job safe That's not necessarily the best way to do a project now I'm not saying IBM is a bad choice to hire either just to put it out there if anyone from IBM's out there You can put away your pitchforks So so what does all this look like so I'm going to give an example of a project that we did How many people have had experience working in higher education in any capacity in a university or a college setting okay, so When I was a graduate student I started to get involved in faculty meetings and I was completely shocked to see that in the university There was a series of about eight meetings to decide which faculty member got how many chairs in which room and And so the saying in in colleges in America is they fight so much because the stakes are so low And so you're fighting for nothing so you might as well fight harder is basically the philosophy and higher education so we were called in by as none talk community college and This entire project was managed by a committee of 12 people and we were told from the offset that these 12 people never agree There are people in the room that have literally never agreed on anything campus-wide and and they need a new website The one thing that they all seem to agree on is they did need a new website But everyone thought had a different reason for why they needed a new website now I mean we can look at their old website and we can come up with about a billion reasons why they need a new website and so Our challenge was to come up with a new website which we were able to do which which this is a community college This is for people that whose parents might not have gone to college. It needs to be really accessible really really friendly Really open really inviting Really comfortable. It can't be scary. This isn't a die-hard really really difficult academic college This is this is a gentle Let's have a couple years get you up to the next level and then you can go on to another another college and challenge yourself more And so this is the project that we built and this project went live One month after we started it from the day we kicked it off to the day it went live was one month There's 500 pages there are 12 stakeholders in it and I'm gonna talk a little about what that looked like and show a Little bit about the roadmap I'm seeing some weird looks doesn't even want to say anything right now because you can say it if you want No, okay Where did I bury them? Okay, so The first five days we had what we call a blitz now. I want to I want to I'm gonna interject for a second here and say Much to my embarrassment after years of mocking agile as the stupidest most useless thing in the world We've kind of become an agile shop and it's kind of Surprising that being said we don't practice scrum For this types of projects that we have we actually find it to be very very slow drawn out and process heavy And so we have our own process we call it the blitz and so the way this one month project work is is worked as we set up a Five-day blitz were day one day three so Monday Wednesday and Friday The client was in the office with us the in-between days our team worked on things and they worked on things in their location and And the bulk of the starting work happened in those five days And then the next three weeks were polishing and filling in content And so I'm gonna walk through what especially what that first week is like so during the first five days We did we got their stakeholders in the room We were adamant that anyone that might be able to change anyone that's gonna disagree with the people in the room Needed to be involved in the first hour And they needed to give some feedback on the direction of the website and what constituted success So we got the president of the college on the phone for an hour We got a couple of high-powered deans in the on the call and then we had our our our small web team of 12 people So we we set the direction We did research on how that works and we did a we did user testing in those in those five days We did design with multiple rounds for vision We got signed off on that design by the 12 person committee. Now. Here's the thing. That's actually really awesome Our designer did a little bit of prep work the day before but not a lot By the end of the first day the 12 person committee actually signed off on the direction It wasn't pixel perfect, but they all said we're okay with that direction And we're okay having self-selected two people out of our team of 12 And remember these are people that fought all the time two people out of our team of 12 to work out any Niggling details and here's the list of stuff that are still unresolved, but we trust these these three people to do it So we got it completely signed off And part of that is we showed them things and and this was a little scary for the designer the first time We did it, but by this project. It wasn't We showed we showed the committee things within two hours of starting to design So the designer was showing concepts very very quickly And so as soon as we had things that were going in the wrong direction We got feedback as soon as we had things that were going in the right direction. We got feedback One person on that committee. It was actually really fascinating because she she really didn't agree with the direction But she could see why we did it and so we were very careful as we talk about design Design language is important. I'm gonna segue for a second. I hope this is okay When you talk about design you should never talk about what someone likes you should talk about what works And so because of the way our process worked we had the core team Select what is the impression we want people to feel when they come to the website and those impressions were welcome warm friendly inviting accessible and so there was one person in particular I'm gonna pop back a couple slides Oops too far. There's one person that in particular that really didn't like the cartoons She thought the cartoons were completely inappropriate for a college She did not think they should be there and she was very felt very strongly about it But we sat down and we said these are this is this is what we agreed including you that we wanted to convey We wanted to convey warm welcome this accessible to absolutely everyone that we we talked about, you know Not pretentious. These are the words that we came up with and this works This solves that problem and and at the end she she said, you know, I Still don't like it, but you're absolutely right. It absolutely works and it's what we need to do And so we did the designs did the revisions we got sign off We did an on-site photo shoot. So day one we did the designs day Either day two or day four. I forgot which one we sent a photographer to their location and the designs We just use stock photos and then we gave directions. We have a couple of photographers We've used a bunch of times that take great direction We sent them out and with the stock photos and we said this is the vibe We want to get and they came back with their photos. So by the by the fifth day They were actually they had their photos already taken also And and as a bonus we were actually able to improve their logo to they had originally said you can't touch our logo And it was too horrendous. The colors were horrible And so when the designer showed the concepts I said here it is and I just had to take the color out of your logo and I just made it white on blue and And I can put the color logo back in if you guys want and everyone in the committee said No, and one of the guys said I'll talk to the president tomorrow and I'll get signed off on this So it's just this we didn't fight it. We just kind of showed it and There's a famous artist in New York City. She's a performance artist Lori Anderson I think her name is and And one of the things that she said is talking about art is like dancing about architecture and and you can't talk about design You need to look at design and then you can talk about what you're seeing, but you can't just talk about it So yeah, so also in those five days we program the templates So by day five they were entering content into their site With a template that started to look like theirs. It wasn't mobile friendly yet, but that's okay With their photos from their students from their photo shoot based on what they signed off on in five days They had no time to change their mind. We didn't need recap meetings. All that stuff went away Built out a bunch of key features. It turned out. They didn't have a digital course catalog Every other college we'd worked with up to that point had some sort of system that they paid for that gave them a Course catalog and we found out on Wednesday that they didn't actually have one all they had was a PDF that was made from an excel file and so So we this is where Drupal is amazing and we've done we've done this sort of projects both with Drupal and WordPress our shop uses both technologies and Where Drupal really shines is because you can spin up a new node type Instantly we actually prototype the course catalog in under an hour and so said we don't have a course catalog So we threw it together. We built something they started to plug things in They actually found out that they didn't know how to cat what the hierarchy of their data was So they didn't know whether the top should be majors departments programs Graduate verse, you know continuing education versus on campus And so they had to go back back on campus on Thursday get the feedback on Friday We finished off the feature and so we get we went into this project not knowing we had to build a course catalog We no matter how much planning or how thick our spec was we probably would have missed that one But at the same time we went into this project knowing that something like that was going to happen And we had the developers ready and standing by and we talked to them We said, okay What's higher priority you newsletter integration or course catalog the client said course catalog and we said great We'll make the course catalog and if they had said newsletter integration They wouldn't have a course catalog and they'd have newsletter integration But they made that decision right there on the spot based on what we were plugging in Content we trained 15 people out of the hundred pages in the first five days So at that point they're very comfortable with it we used to do our trainings and then let clients leave and a week later they'd call us up and say yeah I kind of forgot what I was doing and I need to start over and I don't remember my password We wouldn't let them leave the room until they entered a bunch of content We got them to sign off on the navigation and instead of saying are you guys okay with this navigation? We said are you okay with this navigation being 80% final? Give us your list of concerns and then we went out and tested the concerns and came back with recommendations Most of the time by the time the recommendations came back a day or two later their concerns They'd already forgotten about their concerns and they'd gone away So by the end of five days we had navigation 80% final We took three key key departments that joined us. So the second day the third day Wednesday We had actually 16 people because a couple extra departments came in and we worked on their special needs Because they have different departments of different needs Yeah, and and the other thing is the workflow that we set up for them didn't work for them as an institution point of view So we Organized that too in terms of who can create content who can approve content for publishing things like that We had set up something where they could assign it to other people and it it wasn't working the way They wanted it to so we threw it out and and again because it was Drupal We threw it out and built another one if it was WordPress not I don't think we could have built it in the same time Wordpress is great. Don't get me wrong, but this is where Drupal really shines in my mind So they went live a month later. They had 500 pages a 25 content editors Which I thought was fascinating because we only trained 15 so somewhere along the way They went back and trained 10 more people on campus without even asking us for help Which was kind of awesome and part of the reason for that is because we got everyone together so One of the reasons this whole process works is because of momentum and one of the great things when we talk to people about this is when They look at it. They say one of the first things everyone says is I don't know if I can dedicate a week to this project I don't know how I can carve out that time. We just say well look here's the option Can you carve out three days in that week for this project three days is? 24 hours and Or would you rather carve out 80 hours over the next three months because those are your two options? That's what it looks like the other way when you add all a recap meetings and all the follow-up meetings and all that other stuff and Some people say hey, we'd rather do it over three months and we say Good luck. We're probably not the company work with you and people that say let's make it happen Let's do it right. Let's kick its butt. Those are the people that are the best match for us Questions so far. I'm gonna talk. I have plenty more things to go over but questions if it's remote what we do is we you usually send a subset of our team to their office, so so we sent One of the case studies I'll show in a little bit was in New York And so we sent four people down there for a week and so it's kind of a split as to It's always this catch-22 like the designer have to be in the room to the developer have to be in the room We go back and forth on it We usually find if the content and strategy and photographer are the three most important person people and depending on the size of the project The way our shop set up Sometimes the project manager is one of those three people and sometimes it's a separate person But those are the people that we send on site basically Okay, so the question was how does the how does the fit work with Drupal? I have two stories about that and actually interestingly they both involve WordPress, but the concept still the same right? so first of all I'm going to tell you about our our failure, so this project at this this process is completely failed once and I I Think in terms of a failure. It was an awesome failure, and I think it was actually successful failure in many ways But you guys can totally disagree with me, so let me tell you the story So we were hired by a company that makes a product They had a website that had about 400 pages. They ranked very very well under water water fountains and so like Downstairs if there was a two-story water fountain or when you go to Disney World and there's a fountain spraying up stuff They make those and there's only a couple dozen companies in the in the United States that make those of this level And they they ranked very very well in Google. They got all their business from their website The problem was the person that maintained the website was the owner And he was also the head sales person the lead engineer and the person that did on-site installations So they had six people in the office that couldn't do any of those other things So the general manager came up to us and said we want a website in a content management system that People other than the owner can maintain and we want to help you want went your help moving everything over And so we got in there and we started working for the day And we had the owner and the and the general manager there in the room and we started building out the site and The owner basically did this the whole time. I can do that in front page. Why can't you do it? Front page does that. I just want a table just like I did in front page. Yeah, I want it to be mobile too Miserable miserable day. It just did not progress at all. We built a site that is was easier quicker better to maintain Flexible mobile friendly all these great things, you know at the end of the day. We had content in it We had a workflow. We had thought about the navigation. We thought about changing things But the owner just was absolutely positively wasn't happy And so we just kind of sat him down and we said look here's the deal There's two of you in the room the general manager wants a website that anyone in the office can maintain The owner wants a website built in front page that he maintains We can't solve both those problems like that is just an insolvable problem So what we're gonna do is we're gonna thank you for your time We're gonna refund half your money and we're gonna we're gonna call it a day and we're sorry We can't help you if you at some point if you have a different problem Or if the general manager has a problem that you know if the owner leaves the company or something whatever We can we can work something out, but that's not for us And so you know to complete technology mishmash complete needs mishmash But here's why and I might be deluding myself, but here's why I think it was an amazing success a Traditional project we could have been two and a half months and three quarters of the way through the budget before you found That out instead we were one friggin day through the project We were we and I say one day it was a little more than one day because we had some setup We had some prep we had logistics, but really I mean one day into a project We were able to decide that it was a technology mishmash and to me that was a huge huge huge win I'm gonna give you another example where there's a technology mishmash and it came out kind of the opposite way And this one also was WordPress A client came to us that wanted a website that took huge amounts of data and created Created a site that parsed the data along a number of axes. They wanted charts. They wanted tables. They wanted Responses and questions that related to surveys. He wanted it to be able to work for thousands of surveys He knew it was a huge project. He did not have the budget for it so what he wanted us to do was just build something for one of his clients that was just kind of a Prototype that we could kind of hold up. He could deliver it to the client He's contractually obligated to do it and we could see if there's a way we could efficiently make more of them down the road and so So we sat down with them and we just started building it with standard plugins and it's it's complete brute force I mean, there's each each that the site itself has let me just think about this for a second I want to say 120 pages and and most of them have one or more tables on it and then there's a Little shifting thing where you can say okay only I want to see a segmented by by male versus female I want to see it segmented by age I want to see segmented by this other demographic Completely and totally hard-coded and we put it together and so we started working on it and and in the second day He came in and he's like okay, what I don't get about this is it's not automated How am I going to make a lot of these and and we looked at and we said you're going to make a lot of these by spending $150,000 you're not right now. This is that we you got us for two days What we can give you is this in two days and he thought about it and he said you know what that's totally worth it for me Let's do this in two days. And so he was totally empowered He could see where the where the faults were right there because he was in the room because we had him there Did that answer your question those two stories? Yeah, and the other thing Yeah, yeah exactly Fit the requirements. Okay, so let's talk about project management a little is another question Right in that case the technology. Well, you're saying the technology fit It's not what the owner wanted, but the owner pays the bills so the technology didn't yeah well, I mean it's semantics right at some level and It doesn't matter at some level also right like it's just not a match And and you know getting to know quickly is just as important as getting to yes quickly, right? I mean like the sooner you can do that the better So planning and process there's a little handout about this I have a couple more handouts up here if I know not Everyone got them, but there's a few more up in front that show this timeline You know here's kind of the old-school way of doing it and here's the more modern way of doing it You take everything and you just take out the waste, right? So who who's involved in this who's on the team you have a project manager It's harder to manage a project like this than it is kind of an old school multi month project because you have to stay On top of everything. I mean you basically have to do the same work the same productive work But you're doing it in less time so you have less lag see so as a project manager you need to be Your main goals are making sure that people are on track that that we're checking in on goals and time over and over and over again and that And that there's not lag between things that we're not dragging things out that were that we're making smart choices And so here's another example one of our clients came to us after the contract was signed we got into the kickoff meeting and And our first strategy means meeting which had the president and everything in the room One of the people said I really want to feature where if someone goes to an event They can click a button and they'll get a reminder a week before an email I saw it on some other site I guess I'm sure someone's heard this before I saw it on a different site and I wanted than ours to and I mean again old school We would have said huh that wasn't in the spec that wasn't in the contract now We have to look at scope now We have to look at this other thing instead what we did is we do this exercise We call it sticky buckets and we have little Post-it notes little sticky notes and we have a red one a green one a yellow one and a blue one and the green one means It's really easy less than two hours the yellow one means. It's a little harder less than five hours Red means it's more than five hours and blue means we just have absolutely no idea We'll need to figure it out so we took that idea. It's nothing. We've ever done before and we just wrote it on the blue sticky pads The whole team got together and prioritized and that was high on the list So we sent one of the developers into the other room They went found a module plugged it in it had a couple of issues that really didn't we just weren't sure whether it was right or Not so we showed it to the client and we said look you got three choices right now You can say no to this feature you can use it kind of as is with the plug-in But we'll make it look a little prettier Or we can invest another five or ten hours in in building a custom solution for it and the client said oh You know the module is good enough. That's fine. There's these other things that are higher priority So again, it's it's about figuring out what those what those goals are So keeping in control being assertive One thing that's really important for the project manager to do in a project like this is to make sure there aren't hidden stakeholders So if a client says something like oh, you know, I have to run that by Jim Then the PM has to say I'll be on the call with you and we'll do that right now Don't go back to your office and do it Let's get on the phone right now with Jim because if Jim can derail this project If you really need Jim's input he should have been in the room in the first place And let's not wait till the end of the project to fix that the minute you see that wrong You need to jump on it and that's part of the role the project manager And they have to do all this while being flexible and knowing that every single thing on their plan might change Which is scary and exciting and absolutely awesome So yeah, you need to know roles So, you know, here's an example of what a roadmap looked like for For that project I was just talking about and you could see, you know, there's a surprise feature in there and And so part of what we did with with the with the course catalog is we said flat out Hey, we have a maintenance budget for you We can we can get this to completion if we can tap into that maintenance budget right now And they they huddled and talked about it in five minutes later. We had an answer and we just kept rolling and kept momentum And this is what the first day looked like and you can see as a project manager You need to keep people to the schedule, but you also need to change the schedule So if things happen sooner or quicker Then you need to handle this and I think if anyone needs these slides afterwards You can come and grab me and I'll email them to you or whatever. I'll post them on Twitter or something and Then the teams let me talk briefly about the groups We make a distinction between sometimes we call them visionaries sometimes we call them stakeholders It really depends on the organization we're in and which one's gonna get the best the best play but we have we make a distinction between People that set the direction and people that have important perspective and a lot of times we'll have clients that'll say something like Yeah, we're just not gonna let him in the room or we're not gonna let her in the room because last time they totally derailed The project and we say is okay. Let's change that around Let's bring them in on Wednesday and get their feedback and we control that conversation because we're really good at it And we'll bring them in and we'll say hey look Here was our here's the goal and these are the goals of the site and these were set down by this group in the room Plus the president of the university plus boom boom boom boom boom. These are the goals We came up with this is how we set out to achieve it. We've heard you're someone that has a lot of input Can you please let us know for missing anything on this direction? And so one example of that as there is one site We were doing that we brought someone in that they were trying to keep out of the room and the person said Well, one thing that I see that you're missing is 20% of the people that call our office only speak Spanish And we can't necessarily help that population so it's not core to our mission But we could put something up for them on the website fairly easily and so again halfway through the project We find this new thing. I mean how hard is it to add three pages in Spanish as long as you have someone that speaks Spanish And so we're instantly able to correct for that so that person that in the past had always been the roadblock Becomes becomes a great asset and and and so we take those things we test the heck out of them We do all sorts of fun testing Okay, so Why do projects fail ego and fear is unknown process? So if the reason your projects failing is because you don't actually know what you're doing and you're afraid to say it There are a few things you can do to get help with that, right? But we often find more often the reason projects fails because of bad processes and the way to fix a bad process Is to just get into an iteration loop as quickly as possible and so There are definitely cases where a project fails because someone just doesn't know how to write the code And that's the left-hand side and if that's your problem the project manager should recognize it and remedy that situation But but more often I'm saying the same thing, but I'm saying it hopefully more articulately this time More often when a project fails We see it fails because you're asking the wrong questions or you're jumping to conclusions or you're trying to I mean 12 people can never answer a question 12 people the goal of 12 people in a room is to find questions And then we pull out those questions and we ask other people those questions and we get feedback My wife who's who's basically smarter and better at me that at everything She says that your brand is not what you say it is it's what your customers as it is It's what anyone else says your brand is and the same thing with your site and with usability So you need to put your ego aside Need to get the right people in the room Again talking about ego how many people have worked with a designer that when you gave them feedback got mad at you I mean, right? There's no place for designers like that I have this I have this philosophy that a lot of designers want to be artists They want to have their stuff hung in museums and they can't get there So they're just grumpily being a graphic designer because that's the closest thing that actually pays okay And no matter how talented they are you never want to work with them The person you want to work with is the person that says wow, that's cool Let me try that or I don't think that will work because of this But let me try that and so when in terms of who's on your team from a designer you want someone that's just going to try Absolutely anything and give good feedback I Just saw I wish I could remember the person's name and I'm embarrassed that I don't so my blog Jason on design I just posted an article if anyone hires designers About the the four stages of design and I found this great article online where someone kind of articulated where people are and Where people get stuck and there's people that are really talented designers that never become great and he kind of outlines Where that gap is and it's really exciting. So if you're having frustrating designer experiences, you should look that up low ego flexible confident An expert and they need to have creativity on demand They need to not be afraid to try something and show it 15 minutes later Otherwise, they can't they can't work as part of this team Development again low ego inflexible Enjoyes helping for first simple solution. So here's the problem with developers and I that came out wrong There's more than one problem with developers. No kidding So two interesting tidbits about developers, right? The first one is they've done they've done surveys where they go and they ask people and they say How long do you think it would take you to go to the market and buy milk and come back home? and they ask people and believe it or not Engineers are the worst at estimating that out of pretty much any profession out there, right? Because they always look and and and I think there's two reasons for that, right? But I think the biggest reason is because they're optimists So an engineer looks at a problem and says there's going to be an elegant solution to that and I am going to do that Elegant solution and and that's great, but it doesn't always work out that way Okay, so there's one tidbit about developers the second tidbit about developers is if you're a developer You like complex problems. I mean you'd be a horrible developer if you didn't someone back there said they like Who was it that said they like tricky problems? I mean if you're a developer raise your hand if you like tricky problems I mean right that means you're a good developer. That's a good thing But the downside with that is if you have something that's really easy. It's not fun for you So how do you make it fun for you? you make it really complicated right and so In order for a blitz or or any sort of sprint like this or prototyping go well You need to have someone that actually prefers simple solutions to complex solutions And I was really impressed because the talk I was just at I Was by I think it was aqueous first First employee Gabon Gabon is that I had a Gabor there it is and and I expected it to be like super super technical and way over my head And he's like here's how you use the configuration function And it was very much like I understood everything up there And I'm not a developer at all and I just thought it was this this like plateau where you're like you're a bad programmer You're an okay programmer. You're a great programmer, and then you don't even have to program and he's like And so again this idea of preferring simple solutions And they have to be an expert at the tools they use so it would be a nightmare for a Drupal developer to try to do a blitz in Wordpress or vice versa or something like that. I mean that just wouldn't work And and is comfortably using modules to get get a good start now The modules might not be the bet be all end all but in that first five days if we can work out the whole flow in Modules then the next week developer can go and and work out the details and figure out now We actually have something that we're prototyping and poking at and seeing we can get it to the next step So we kind of need everyone to be an expert And so what's tricky about that is like what's what's an expert from the client point of view? You know if you're working with the sales department or a customer service department or the operations expert They they're not going to be an expert at web development They're not going to be an expert at design or branding or user interaction or user experience or any of those things So what are they an expert at and and one thing I want to put out there is if someone comes to you with answers They're a salesperson not an expert right so experts ask questions. So here's an example of it Take a look at this this picture here, okay, so does anyone know which test one has anyone seen that website? It's super cool, isn't it? Oh, it's amazing So what they've done there so which test one collects tests like this So we're going to do a show of hands here which test one looked at this and said which Which one converts better the one with the icons across the top in the text or the one without the icons and so Oh, I just gave away the answer darn it. Okay. We'll have to go to the next one and so Okay, so let's do this one. I won't click any farther on this one. I guarantee Okay, so which one's more effective a or b so we're gonna have a vote ready So the only difference is the color black and the words. I mean, they're very subtly different, right? So which one of these converted better if you think it was a raise your hand Got a few if you think it was B raise your hand Okay Dominant is B Okay Next one. Oh my gosh. I totally screwed up this slide. I shouldn't have looked at it. Okay, wait Here we go. Let's go to this one. Okay, so So which one of these emails converted better and they have basically the same content But you can see they're presented so differently. One is an HTML one with a lot of graphics This is an opt-in email So people have asked to get this email and one is plain text and they just they didn't ask people whether they wanted plain Text or not they just a B tested it and so so the question then becomes Which one converted more and so raise your hands if you think it's a plain text one And raise your hands if you think it's the graphical one Okay, so now look at those conversion numbers. That's absolutely friggin huge. Okay, so So here's this is the example that I give to clients when they don't want to bring someone in that has a different opinion than them Because I'm just gonna go out there and say I think most of the people in this room are pretty darn smart Did anyone get both of those right? I wish I could have done three because got one person got two people got both of them, right? I mean I've when I do all three very rarely does a room this size get any of get get all three of them, right? I mean, it's just amazing right so again experts are people that ask questions And so you want to get people in the room you want to be open to that and again It comes down to project management, which is good because we have a lot of leaders in here Did it and so the trick of the project manager is to focus them and to not let people Get stuck in the quagmire of questions. I mean anytime anyone has a back-and-forth. So here's a great example. We're working with the department It's another higher-ed example. I wish I wish I could think of another one right now but I'm just gonna go with this so we're working with with Dartmouth College and and The room was very evenly divided as to what should happen. This was for a specific department What should happen on the department web page and half the people thought there should be a section that said specifically Just for students just for guidance counselors just for parents just for alumni Just for and there were a few different categories and either have thought very strongly. That's horrible They wanted it clean and simple so you have the clean and simple clamp camp and you have the Lots of clear buttons camp and so they were going back and forth So we just said guys we're gonna take this question and we're gonna we're gonna come back to it in two days When we regroup we've captured it. We've talked about it enough Let's just take it away and regroup and so We got in the car. We had about a two-hour drive back to our office so we got in the car and before we lost cell reception we called up the office and got one of our developers on the phone and What they did was they went to the current website, which was absolutely horrendous and They hacked those buttons into it So it didn't look too ugly didn't look much uglier than it already looked But it actually had those buttons in there and all of them linked somewhere So by the time we got back to the office. They had that programmed. We sent it to their current web team and we said hey Can you replace this line of code with this line of code on the current site for a week? One week later. We had data and what the data showed is only one of those buttons ever got clicked on So what do we do? We put that button in the navigation and the decision is completely gone And so again when you get a bunch of people in the room You want to keep in mind your goal of having those people in the room is to ask questions not to find answers Okay, so I'm going to do a couple quick examples and then some more questions. So This was a project. We did in a month complete redesign Increase doubled two and a half times and they had a four-fold increase in six months Here's what a two-week project looks like it's a much smaller team we did print material as well as a website This is maybe a 30 page website with a very very difficult board of directors We we've got their board of directors to self-nominate a representative to come and And and they were pretty happy. They've never really managed their board of directors that well before This was a one-week project. This one might have been bed in square space Which we use sometimes because use the easiest tool possible, right? This also applies to big projects and so one thing I want to point out again. I was thinking about this during the keynote Wordpress has a lot of issues one of their issues is it has a really frigging big code base because every It always supports everything in the past and it never gets rid of versions But but if you do a Google Trends to see what what gets the most searches you see Wordpress blows away Drupal And and so, you know, we're talking about with Drupal going to this thing where we won't be holding up releases for every single feature Wordpress has been doing that for a while, and I don't think it's a coincidence. I really do think that's one of the reasons Why they're able to maintain their their market lead. I Thought this was a great quote that someone had on it. Is this person in the room? I don't even know It's a great quote Here's a project we did for a client a month-long project for a for Yale and Johnson and Johnson first month we built it and The the whole data component of it completely failed second month We brought in a we had brought in one of our PHP developers and a freelance PHP Drupal developer that had been using Drupal for Seven years and our Dev and only been using it for a couple years built the whole thing failed again Third month we scrapped everything they did and a site builder who'd only been using Drupal for Five or six months went in and rebuilt it using modules and we needed I don't know I want to say like a hundred lines of PHP code at the end of the day and it worked flawlessly This was a longer project than and some of those other ones And then it took about ten months of burn-in before we actually got everything We were constantly iterating and constantly growing but again all different sizes, so Okay, so I am going to We just fly through a couple of these Momentum is important. You might have gotten that for me. Of course. I'm slowing down here. So there you go One thing I want to share is so a lot of times people hear this and they're like that's great But it would never work at my organization. This has worked at so many organizations that I've seen You just have to get the right people in the room and frame it the right way And what Toyota recommends is you just start small you pick one little battle That'll have big at ink big big good outcome and you do it and then you start sharing it and go to the next go to the next step Okay, there's some hints on the table. There's handouts and I Have a few minutes left for questions. Sorry. I'm running a little later. I digress. So who has questions? Right. So you have a stakeholder. I'll come in and say I want to discuss it And I want to involve the whole team and I want the whole marketing team involved and I want a billion people involved So first of all we work really hard to make sure we get the right people time held on their calendar early enough and so We'll ask our clients things like hey is the is is is your director prone to bring in a bunch of people and ask a lot Of questions if so, who are the people they bring in the most can they all hold? Two hours on their schedule the same two hours and Wednesday afternoon and we'll call them if we do have questions And so this goes back to the project management side of it figure anyone you Anyone you have a very good chance of needing and make sure you block off at least a little time And so this this is what we this is what we use the perspective group for the second thing is our process is really focused on Getting stakeholders to say words listening to those words and repeating back the right answer using their own words and so instead of saying what do you think of this design like first of all We try very hard to make sure that only our team can present designs to anyone and so instead of saying What do you think of this time? Okay, so here's the example ready How many people love the color yellow like it's in their top two colors raise your hand if yellow is one of your top colors Okay, so we got about eight people how many people it's in the bottom two colors. They really don't like yellow They probably wouldn't ever wear a yellow shirt. Okay, so we got about eight people So if I show you a design that's yellow We instantly have two camps and if I say what do you think about this? We got about eight people in this room that love it and eight people in the room that hate it and a bunch of Other people that are just listening to him ping-ponging back and forth Maybe shifting a little on the spectrum one way or another right now on the other hand if I say Yellow is the color of school buses and taxis in the United States The reason for that is because science says it's one of the colors that catches your eye the most So we've picked the color that's not too faded out That's going to catch everyone's eye and it really stands out. Here's how it compares to your competitors So when your your client goes to these four websites when they get to yours Yours is going to be like a slap in the face and remember the words you came up with were different bold Innovative so we we decided to do it this way. Do you have any feedback on that now? It's a suddenly it's a very very different Proposition we have also put together presentations for clients where after we're during the rollout We'll bring in their marketing team or their support team or their sales team and we'll actually present the methodology We went through behind the process because we can either win by having a design someone likes or we can have or we can Have people agree with the methodology We'll take them offline. Okay. Sorry. I thought I had took quarter after quarter up Thank you all appreciate it