Posted by amye on April 22, 2010 at 8:57pm
During DrupalCon SF, a few of us had conversations about how there's not a whole lot of project manager community, and subsequently, not a whole lot of contributing back.
To kickstart this, I've registered #drupal-pm, but nothing has really been decided about what the area's tagline should be.
It's a place for project managers in the community to gather, but beyond that, open to discussion about area rules, et al.
Go ahead and weigh in about what our next steps are for building the project manager community in Drupal.
-- amye
Comments
Ideas for PM Group
Meeting with other Drupal project managers for the first time was one of the highlights of Drupalcon for me.
The major take-aways for me were to become more familiar with Agile and a desire to help launch (re-launch?) this group.
I'm thinking #drupal-pm would be a valuable mutual service by enabling Drupal PMs to:
- Ask for advice/suggestions of group participants on managing clients and projects;
- Post links to really useful PM resources;
- Compare experiences (pros & cons) of PM methodologies and PM software tools; and
- For PMs that don't have a development background, to ask for the relevant PM-perspective technical information they need.
How about if we develop specific topic forums with these types of themes?
Kurt
More ideas for PM group
I think all of the above is great! In additional I would be interested in exploring the following topics within the Drupal PM community:
I also enjoyed the opportunity to meet other PMs working in Drupal-land and would love to see a Drupal PM community that is as rich and dynamic as the Drupal developer community.
Circling back around
I think we could do some great webinars around each of these themes.
I'd also be down with organizing a 'book club' for Drupal PMs. What I'm reading, what you're reading, circling back around and commenting on it. The more resources we can document as to being helpful, the better.
-- amye
...and more ideas for PM group
Amye, enjoyed your session at DrupalCon, and am glad to see you kick-starting this thread! SF was my first DrupalCon, and I'm excited about getting as involved with other business users for enrichment as our developers do on the tech side.
In addition to the great ideas above from Kurt & Justine for covering project management techniques, a couple more thoughts --
Learning how to assess the scope of a project using Drupal. While modules can speed dev work on some fronts, custom work is still custom code, and I'm aiming to better understand how I can give my company's stakeholders a better idea of when a project is easy vs. hard.
CMS interfaces within Drupal. I saw flashes of some really amazing CMS interfaces that had extended core a LOT in making them easier to use. Would love to flgure out how to exchange knowledge on this front.
Scoping + CMS Interfaces
Scoping is something that I think we all do a little bit by fire every time. I was actually in a conversation with one of my teams the other day about establishing an internal point system for modules. Like: 1+ if you've used it before in a site, 2+ if you liked it and it was easy to work with, 3+ if you're familiar with the person who built it, 4+ if you've talked to them, etc.
It might look pretty whimsical, but would you be interested in seeing a table like that?
CMS interfaces are tougher to get at, they're sometimes custom code for each site, but I'll ask around and see if I can't get some case studies together on 'How we made this site more fun to use'.
module vetting
I've used a system like this for a large project, and teaching somebody how to vet a module (look at the issue queues, review the commit history, etc) and putting it within a requirements matrix is pretty hard. Definitely a great train-up for PMs.
@amye: Case studies in this regard are a great idea - I'm writing a few for my firm anyway next month, so adding the "why this module and not the other one" portion to each isn't too much of a stretch! I'm leery of the "don't bother vetting! just check out this wiki page!" approach that a master module matrix presupposes. It's a shortcut, and probably a disservice to the project at hand if used as a crutch. Showing how a particular module was selected and why provides insight, though, so I'm fully behind the case study concept. Where do you think those should go?
I am so excited by this
I am so excited by this thread. Finally a place to share the Challenges and Ideas amongst Drupal PMs. Drupal PMs - I think are a separate CLAN :)
@amye should we create a Wiki of most used modules and link them to a poll each ... I like your idea of rating modules, how do you think we can extend to have the community evaluate it?
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
Any progress in the group?
Hi all,
I'm a seasoned technologist, project manager, and development lead in the San Francisco Bay Area. Would anyone care to meet and get some headway on the group? There are some very interesting topics to cover as a focus group then present to the greater Drupal community.
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