Project management consulting and training for social change organisations.
I spent the day on Friday of last week co-facilitating an offsite meeting of the Greenpeace UK web team with team manager (and fellow Canadian), Tracy Frauzel. Great day, fantastic group of people, and in my books, a really good meeting — we met to define the objectives, high-level requirements, and critical success factors for a web project the team plans to undertake, but made sure to spend some time talking about (and mapping what we came up with onto) the strategic objectives of Greenpeace as an organization as well. This is an often skipped but important step in the project planning process given the fact that organizations always and only undertake projects in order to achieve strategic objectives (and that, in this sense, strategic planning is always done for project management — see Kerzner's Strategic Planning for Project Management for more on this).
Tracy — thanks again for the opportunity to work with you and your team, and Andrew, Bex, Jamie and Joss — it was great meeting you and I look forward to seeing you again soon :)
strategicplanning, projectmanagement, nptech, haroldkerzner, greenpeace, importantprojects, ecampaigning
Some time ago, I was commissioned by Katrin Verclas of Aspiration to write an article on collaborative software projects, using two (partially) failed projects as examples of what not to do. It's been a long time coming, and in the end, involved collaborating with Important Projects ally Phil Dwyer to complete, but here it is, what I hope will be the first in a series of HOW TO articles published on this site under a Creative Commons license:
HOW TO Manage Collaborative Software Projects (148 KB)
Recommendations made in the article for the successful management of collaborative software projects:
Enjoy! Very interested in any feedback you might have as well :)
projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, collaboration, nptech, howto, importantprojects
So I made it to the Future of Web Apps Summit last week, and although my question for the panel wasn't asked (which isn't surprising given what turned out to be the focus of the conference — not "how Web 2.0 applications are changing the way people interact online," but rather, "how to build a business around the fact that they are"), I did get the chance to speak briefly with David Hansson of 37signals about software project management (and whether they plan to build scheduling functionality into Basecamp, which they don't). It's interesting — despite feeling excluded by his definition of the open source "community" (i.e. that it is only "solutions to problems of contributors"), and although some of the slides from his presentation reminded me of 1984, I agree with a lot of what he has to say (e.g. constraints are liberating — they allow us to focus on what is to/can be done), even if he doesn't believe project baselines are necessary :)
In terms of writing up notes from the conference, Simon Willison has done an amazing job here, and rumour has it podcasts of the presentations given will be made are available on the summit site in the near future.
P.S. 37signals has announced the launch of Campfire today, their "real-time web-based group chat tool for business." I participated in some load testing of the product last week, and it's pretty awesome.
furtureofwebapps, davidhansson, 37signals, schedulingfunctionality, basecamp, 1984, constraints, baselines, open source, community, campfire, importantprojects
Next Wednesday I'll be heading to Kensington Town Hall for The Future of Web Apps — a one-day conference bringing together a panel of Web 2.0 celebrities including Joshua Schachter from del.icio.us, David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals (creators of Basecamp), Eric Costello from Flickr, and others, to discuss how next generation web applications are changing the way people interact online. The organizers of the event have put up a wiki and are accepting questions-for-the-panel submissions from conference participants. Only one question will be chosen — here's mine:
The venue has wifi, so I may be able to blog on what I learn as the conference is going on — if not, I'll be sure to summarize things afterwards :)
