Stanford Drupal Camp - Business/Project Management

Drupal Project Management (PM) Hard-Learned Lessons

Quevin — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 18:46:14 +0000

Not a credentialed Project Management Professional (PMP)®? That's OK! Most Drupalers learned by experience, whether it's PHP or PM. And that's me too! Learn from my hard-learned lessons, with a few entertaining short stories too. Don't make the same mistakes I have, and this may help with a project(s) you manage or are part of right now.

Historyically, we know that about 25% of all Web projects FAIL. Only 32% are "successful"  (on time, on budget, fully functional). Then there's a spectrum of project outcomes between failure and success that would be "challenged" (late, over budget, and/or less than promised functionality). Let's discuss some methods to help address and reduce project risk, and how to identify problems before they escalate.

Quevin (kweh-vin)—the business—practices the most effective methods to plan, produce, and promote exceptional (Drupal CMS based) websites.

Quevin, LLC was established in 2007, founded by Kevin Davison, and has since completed many great projects with hundreds of happy clients to share about. Quevin's unique because it's an efficiently organized, well-sustained, San Francisco Bay Area business that seeks to establish excellent, long-term relationships with valued clients. Quevin's passionate about creating amazing outcomes from every project, and to improve business-related conditions for every client.

Experience level:

Beginner

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

Quevin

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 16:00 to 16:45

Track:

Business/Project Management

Consultancy Scrum: Making Agile Work for Clients and Vendors

Todd Nienkerk — Sat, 15 Mar 2014 16:54:51 +0000

(UPDATE) Download slides here!

Scrum and other agile methodologies were created by organizations to manage and develop their own products using their own resources. As a result, they're inward-facing. The stakeholders, Product Owner, Scrum Master, and team are all part of a single company. Budgets and resources are often managed by a single entity. All parties are invested in the process, which makes communication between stakeholders and the team relatively easy.

Vendors, however, are external to the client, so our Scrum must be outward-facing. We cannot rely on the client to be good stakeholders or Product Owners. Clients control the budget, and we control the resources. Not all parties are invested in process. Often, the client has hired us to simply make a problem "go away," and they don't care what methods are used to manage the project.

How can we make agile work for clients and vendors?

In this session, we will explore this question in detail, drawing heavily from Four Kitchens' six years of experience bringing agile methodologies to our clients' projects. Our goal is to explain how we've modified scrum to work in a client-facing environment — and how you can make it work, too. The following topics will be covered:

Identifying the problem: Scrum was designed for products and internal teams and stakeholders. Consultancies work on projects with external teams and stakeholders.
Line-by-line comparison of Scrum Classic™ and Consultancy Scrum (Four Kitchens' approach).
Who should be the PO? The pros and cons of assigning Product Ownership to the client or vendor.
How to effectively manage clients' expectations and emotional needs by adding an Account Manager role to the project.
What a contract or "Scope of Work" means in an agile environment — and how to effectively manage them.
...And much more!

Related sites and materials

About the speaker

Todd Nienkerk is a Digital Strategist and Partner at Four Kitchens. He and the other Web Chefs spend their days making big websites. Todd is also a Certified Scrum Product Owner, which is something he doesn't get to say very often (especially in the third person).

Experience level:

Advanced

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

Todd Nienkerk

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 14:00 to 14:45

Track:

Business/Project Management

How Integration with Drupal Can Help Grow Your Organization

benschluter — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 16:05:11 +0000

Your Drupal site is getting the job done. But, if you are like most organizations you want to increase awareness and traffic, with the ultimate goal of increasing sales & growth. But how do you leverage your website to do that? Most of us eventually purchase new applications that bill themselves as tools for attracting and tracking visitors, monitoring keywords, marketing automation and increasing conversions.

How many applications do you currently have? Are they truly helping you grow? With so many new applications (there seems to be a new one everyday) is technology really simplifying the lives of your marketing and sales teams? If each one of the multiple applications you use is not seamlessly integrated with your Content Management System (CMS) then technology is only making things more challenging.

As solution architects we here at Achieve Internet likes to focus on tightly integrated ecosystems leveraging the right third party platforms for the job. These solutions enhance the user’s experience, simplify the lives of your staff staff, and are proven to increases growth.

In this webinar you will learn:
• The issues facing Sales and Marketing Departments in an online marketplace
• The challenges with having disparate sources of information on applications not tightly connected to Drupal
• How effectively leveraging Drupal and existing third party platforms can increase efficiencies at every step of the customer decision journey
• The underlying technology used to make the integration work
• The benefits of a harmonious integration between Drupal and third party platforms

Experience level:

Intermediate

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

benschluter

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 16:00 to 16:45

Track:

Business/Project Management

Zicasso Case Study: The Great Million Node Migration

Aimee Degnan — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 06:00:10 +0000

Zicasso.com is a luxury travel website that brings the world’s top travel specialists together with travelers who want the vacation of a lifetime. Starting on Drupal 5 in 2008, Zicasso built a sophisticated custom travel matching and planning platform that has no equal. In 2012, with Drupal 5 no longer supported, Zicasso started their plan for a great migration to Drupal 7.

THE CHALLENGES

Code - The Drupal 5 codebase had hacks to Drupal core and to many of the contributed/community modules. This prevented an “upgrade” path to Drupal 6 and was one main reason the site stayed on an old version of Drupal 5 for so long. With Drupal 7 mature at this point, it made sense to do a migration from 5 to 7 by building a new site in Drupal 7 and migrating using the migrate and migrate_d2d modules.

Complexity - The Drupal 5 site had a lot of custom code and complex workflows and logic. It was often joked “We have a million and one rules.” It took a lot of meetings and diagrams and documentation to see what Zicasso had developed and how to streamline and improve their processes. This included better tools for the travel agents and for the Zicasso team handling matching and customer support.

Content Strategy - In Drupal 5, many pages were dynamically generated and Zicasso had no control on the content on these pages including meta tags. SEO was a key focus when rearchitecting the site in Drupal 7 to ensure better content control. We built a lot of flexible taxonomy-based landing pages to meet this need.

Data - There were indeed over a million nodes in Drupal 5. 1056184 to be exact. Couple this with over 200 thousand managed files, and this is a lot of data to handle. Heavily testing migration code was key and, with the length of time needed to migrate any given content type (sometimes 2 or 3 days), rollback on the soon-to-be-live-site really couldn’t be an option. Migrations were handled in incremental batches with the final migration happening on the night of the final cutover.

Beautification - The Drupal 5 site had gone through some recent facelifts and looked pretty good for many of the key pages but it still looked a bit outdated compared to the latest photo-heavy designs like airbnb.com and tripadvisor.com. And, the old site wasn’t built for tablets or phones and, with increasing traffic for mobile, a responsive theme was a must for the Drupal 7 redesign. Beyond responsiveness, the new site uses flat design, rich imagery, and parallax for the home page to convey the luxury travel feel.

THE WIN

After the million node migration, Yuchun Ku, Zicasso’s COO, said “Wooow - the upgrade from D5 to D7 is like changing from a Honda Civic to Tesla! “ The new design, the responsive pages, the streamlined workflows, and enhanced content editing features all made for a big win for the Zicasso team.

Experience level:

Beginner

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

Aimee Degnan

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 11:00 to 11:45

Track:

Business/Project Management