Project management consulting and training for social change organisations.
Today was the first meeting of the Greenpeace UK "E-Business" requirements prioritisation team (pictured above — and thanks for posing for the photo, people).
We met to kick-off a 5 week requirements definition and prioritisation project — really a sub-project of a larger project Greenpeace UK has undertaken to provide supporters with the ability to manage their relationships with Greenpeace online.
We'll be following a requirements definition and prioritisation process really similar to the one the web team and I followed on the Greenpeace UK CMS project (and when I say similar I mean identical but with improvements gleaned from our experience in engaging with the Plone and Drupal communities throughout that process).
Gideon, Joss, Katie and Tracy — thanks for your time today and I look forward to working with you on this very exciting and important project :)
projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, nptech, greenpeace, importantprojects, howto, prioritise, requirements, open source, community
Alright — Phillip, Rolf and I have been having a conversation about whether personal time management training is more important for not-for-profits than project management training, given that (to quote Phillip):
Initially, I thought we were debating this in terms of whether not-for-profits could or should put (to quote Phillip again) "traditional, top-down project management processes into practice." Red herring! Turns out we're debating whether personal time management training is more important than project management training for not-for-profits given that (again, says Phillip) "...many people don't have an accurate picture of their available time." Ahem. Alright, then!
I agree that understanding available time is critical to getting things done, especially when you're working on a number of things at once (and as not-for-profit staff always are). And I do recommend looking at David Allen's book — at the very least, his time-management-as-martial-art metaphors are very cool ;-)
The point I'll make in this post is this: very often, when folks working for not-for-profits are overextended and/or unable to manage their time effectively, the root cause is organisational (i.e. cultural), not individual. Culturally, not-for-profit organisations need to understand and value the concepts fundamental to good project management before individual staff are even in a position to manage their time effectively. It's ironic, but many not-for-profit organisations working for sustainability often do so in a very unsustainable way.
An example: when work is planned, effort estimates for individual tasks should be provided by the people who are going to perform those tasks, and not by the individuals/ teams/sponsors who may need the work done.
projectmanagement, timemanagement, training, nptech, importantprojects, community bandwidth, phillipsmith, rolfkleef, webofchange
A few weeks ago I blogged that we'd completed the 3 product evaluations we'd scheduled as part of the requirements phase of the Greenpeace UK CMS project (where we scored Planet 2/OpenACS, Plone and Drupal against our top 35 requirements) and that our next steps were to review and interpret the results of the evaluations, consider our non-functional requirements, make our product/vendor decision and plan the next phases of the project. Although we don't have all the information we need to make our final business case to the Greenpeace UK senior management team quite yet, we have made a provisional decision — budget permitting, we're going with Drupal.
It's been an extremely tough decision to make because there are very real advantages (and disadvantages) to each of the products we've considered. And all the people we've interacted with throughout the process we've followed have been so friendly and helpful and passionate which makes even announcing this difficult, but in the end, given our specific requirements and situation, we've decided that Drupal makes the most sense.
For anyone who may be interested, here's the spreadsheet we used to perform our evaluations:
Greenpeace UK CMS Feature Evaluations (98 KB). (And if you're really interested, I'm happy to take a crack at answering any questions you may have as you take a look through our scores and wonder why one product did better than another here-but-not-there, etc.)
Our next steps are to define the scope of work for the next phases of the project as best we can, send out our RFP to the shortlist of Drupal vendors we've identified, make a vendor decision, and present our final business case to the budget approvers at Greenpeace UK.
Onwards!
projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, nptech, importantprojects, greenpeace, productevaluation, drupal, open source, cms
