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Sprinting to Go Live

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The finish line has been set for months.

The crowd grows anxious as the race date nears.

The race organizers wait with anticipation as the coach assures them everything is moving ahead as planned.

The racers have trained, trained and trained some more. They’ve met hurdles that seemed far too high. But through perseverance and dedication, they are nearing the starting line.

I’m not referring to a UTC Mocs Track and Field event but the analogy works in this case. I’m talking about the pending go live of the UTC website as we start the migration from OUCampus to Drupal 8.5. By the end of August, we will have content live in the Acquia Cloud developed in Drupal.

This is no small feat.

Since late April, the Web team of Chris Gilligan and Mike Flores has been planning their work in a series of ‘sprints’ in order to stay focused and on task to meet the August goal. The term ‘sprint’ is often used in software project management circles as “a short, time-boxed period when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work.”

The two-week sprints include configuration management (reviewing all the settings to move code from place to place in an organized and efficient manor), content type development, architecture refinement, testing and deployment, and user experience development. Our team is guided by information obtained from Acquia and the larger Drupal community. And, it’s been using tools like Jira and Confluence to capture tasks, meeting notes and to-do lists. For more on sprints in software development, visit the Atlassian Coach.

While the rest of the Web team has focused on the Website Refresh project, Mike and Chris have devoted their time to the development of a content management system that will be modern, clean and ready for the long race.

Stay tuned in coming weeks as we anticipate go live and cheer on the team as they ably sprint to the finish line.

The Fine Art of Following Up

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Nobody likes to be nagged. Whether it comes from your mom, your spouse, or your boss, it may have more to say about the nagger than the naggie.

To be a good project manager, one must find ways of following up that yield results over resentment. As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, a role of a project manager is to make sure a project completes on time, at or under budget and within scope. I also like to add a fourth element and that’s to maintain a positive, productive working relationship with all the stakeholders on a project. I’m happy if no one dies or is incarcerated as a result of a project I’ve managed!

Projects can easily get off track. Especially during summer, project participants go on vacation, take days off for holidays or generally are away from the office. Yet the project remains. So it is with our Website Refresh project.

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Time Marches On

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How do we predict how long it will take to <fill in the blank>? When it comes to initiatives or activities that have been done before, experience plays a pivotal role in determining outcome. On the other hand, luck may play just as much of a role in the end.

I’ve managed dozens and dozens of projects over the years. Based on my years of experience, I should be able to more or less accurately predict a project’s timeline. I also know that every project is different and, while I’m pretty good at identifying risk factors at the start of the project, there will always be something that comes up that no one thought of before. A bit like Murphy’s Law, but we’ll call it Whipple’s Hypothesis for now.

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It Always Starts Small

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It’s called Scope Creep. It happens when someone says ‘we need a new dishwasher’ and seven months later, after walls have been removed, new cabinets have been set in place and new appliances hooked up, that you realize the $900 dishwasher cost way more and took a lot more time. Classic scope creep!

Most project managers recognize scope creep is happening when someone says, ‘Well, while we’re doing this anyway, let’s <fill in the blank>.’

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Communicate: Why bother?

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Do you remember playing the Telephone Game as a child?

It’s the game where someone whispers a story to the next person and the whispering continues around the circle until the final ‘receiver’ relays the message to the entire group. Most of the time, this is followed by laughter as the story details have changed dramatically with each new receiver on the other end of the telephone line.  The grapevine or the water cooler can be metaphors for the Telephone Game played out in adult conversations.

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What is Project Management?

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Hope is not a plan.

I hope it doesn’t rain today, but I plan to take my umbrella just in case.

At the heart of project management is a hope or dream that, whatever the outcome, it will be positive and timely. The larger the project (dictated by number of people involved, amount of time needed to complete the project or general complexity of achieving the project goal), the more “project management” is needed.

Millions of projects are undertaken each year with little more than the final goal in mind.  Many of those will reach the goal with little more than an Excel spreadsheet of tasks and a person with the drive to see the mission accomplished.

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