Approximately 20 people gathered for the first BoF, which, with only 30 minutes, limited what we could do. It was, essentially, a meeting about meetings - the worst kind. However, it help clarify what would be best to talk about at DrupalCon and how much people wanted to talk about the subject.
The various pain points identified by the people in the room were (in order of most votes):
- Project Management Tools
- Project Management Methodologies
- Multi-threading projects
- Distributed teams
- Estimation
- How to write specs
- Client management
- How to stay on budget
There will be three follow-up BoFs on the top three and the notes will hopefully be captured below.
There was also some discussion on some resources available to Drupal PMs. The first is obviously this forum; the second is a site I created, DruPM.com, the intent of which is to collect various tools and processes from Drupal organizations as well as conduct interviews with Drupal PMs to gain insight on how they do project management.
There was a quick discussion on everyone's favorite PM tools - the results were:
- Basecamp (5 votes)
- Atlassian suite (JIRA, etc.) (4 votes)
- Redmine (4 votes)
- Google Docs (3 votes)
- Unfuddle (3 votes)
- 5PM
- Pivotal Tracker
- Freshbooks
- TRAC
- .Project
- Teamwork PM
- Active Collab
- Filemaker
- and a negative vote for Filemaker
Amye Scavarda reminded everyone that there were project management sessions at DrupalCon. I will link them below so that we might find video after DrupalCon. I will also link everyone to their company bios over time (assistance is welcome). Those most closely tied to project management are/were:
- Getting Early Estimates Right by Jakob Persson of NodeOne - Tuesday at 1:45pm
- Strategies for Client Management panel (Amye Scavarda/function, Chris Strahl/Acquia, Vanessa Turke/ImageX Media, Seth Brown/Lullabot, Rachel Scott.Lullabot) - Tuesday at 4:30p
- Project Management as an Art Form panel (Nicole Lind/Treehouse Agency, Joel Sackett/Phase2 Technology, Amy O'Malley/Palantir, George DeMet/Palantir) - Wednesday at 1p
- Show Me the Money (Pricing Strategy) panel (Liza Kindred/Lullabot, Eric Gundersen/Development Seed, James Walker/StatusNet, Matt Westgate/Lullabot) - Wednesday at 3:45p
- Lessons Learned from the Agile Process Applied panel (Jenn Sramek/CivicActions, Elizabeth Raley/CivicActions, Justine Hirsch/CivicActions) - Thursday at 3:45p
More notes will be captured in this space as we have further discussions.