and CMS migration
We are making great headway in our push to refresh the website in preparation for the Drupal migration later this year.
Sarah Joyner, Michael Z. Miller and Chèrie Whipple meet weekly with department leadership and web editors to review current pages and discuss changes to be made to bring content up to date.
Having worked as a trainer and educator for a large part of my professional and volunteer life, I can say, with 100 percent certainty, that we all need a little training now and then.
It’s all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you’re properly trained. -Queen Elizabeth II
I need somebody
(Help) not just anybody
(Help) you know I need someone
(Help)
Welcome to your first day of Spring term 2019. Before you even refill your coffee cup, you notice there are some changes needed on your departmental web site that just have to be fixed. Right. Now.
You could use some help from the UTC Web Team but aren’t sure how to contact them other than calling one of the team members and hoping their voicemail isn’t full or to find out they left the country and haven’t returned from break.
As this will be the last post before Winter Break and the end of 2018, let’s take a look back over the last several months. Pour yourself a virtual toddy, throw a log on the fire and reflect on what has been accomplished.
Website Refresh: We have refreshed content, revitalized pages and transformed sites across the student-facing galaxy this fall. By the time you read this, these pages will be showing off their fresh new look and feel: [Read more…]
In order to form a more perfect website, the UTC web team and colleagues from across campus, including the Library and Information Technology, will be participating in a series of training workshops.
Lee Walker, a local Drupal expert with Code Journeymen, kicks off the workshops this week, Dec. 10-14. Lee’s workshops are intended for those with technical skill sets and who will be supporting the Drupal content migration and managing the system and coding environments.
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>.’
Time to assess progress and celebrate accomplishments! I started working with the UTC Communications and Marketing team in mid-September to provide project management for the Drupal migration. As projects often layout, a few other tasks have crept into the initial plan, but I’d like everyone to recognize what has been accomplished in summary form:
Birds definitely do it. Bees and educated fleas might do it.
I can surely state that data definitely…migrates. In that old song the metaphor referred more to falling in love than moving software and data around, but the concept of migration applies. Software and data don’t fly south for the winter, but they can fly to another location and those in information technology refer to this as a ‘migration.’
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.
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.
