Project management consulting and training for social change organisations.
Thanks, everybody :)
Cake recipe. Icing recipe. Party details.
anniversary, birthday, importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment
Photo by itzpapalotl, January 2008
I want to quickly plug the second installment of Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects, the Aspiration/Idealware-organised event I attended in New York a couple of months ago (and thoroughly enjoyed). Having just been at 08NTC in New Orleans, and with a trip to Toronto coming up in June, I'm not going to be able to make it there myself, but do strongly recommend it to any of you not-for-profit technology project managers out there who can :-)
All the details are available on the Aspiration site, but here's a snippet:
Interactive sessions and demos will allow a diverse group of participants to compare processes, tools, successes, and lessons learned. We will discuss areas such as team collaboration, project planning, software selection, migration, and project rollout, and map out the software tools — from project management packages to collaborative communication to issue tracking and more — that support successful technology projects.
aspiration, aspirationtech, conference, idealware, importantprojects, MNTP, nptech, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment
Next week I'm heading to New Orleans! I've been invited to present at NTC 2008 so I'm making the long haul and staying for just under a week. I've invited Jenn Sramek of CivicActions to co-present with me — we're going to talk about how we worked together on amnesty.org last year. Here's a description of our session, Project Management for Techies: Delivering on Time and Budget — hope to see you there!
To deliver nonprofit technology projects in a fixed amount of time and for a fixed amount of money, project scope – the work to be performed by the project team – cannot also be fixed; the product of projects with fixed timelines and budgets must be determined up-front or over the course of the project, given project constraints.
In this session, we’ll take a look at two fundamentally different approaches to managing this challenge – the waterfall method (sometimes referred to as "traditional" software development) and Scrum (an "Agile" method), and talk about the implications of each on project management in a nonprofit context.
08NTC, civicactions, conference, importantprojects, jennsramek, nptech, NTEN, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, training
Great day on Friday last week — I was invited by my good friend and colleague Phillip Smith to deliver a project management lunch & learn to the folks at the New Internationalist communications co-operative in Oxford. Really interesting to speak with such a tight-knit, structurally-flat and financially-independent organisation beginning to think about making changes to how it operates after 30 years of producing an award-winning publication.
If it ain't broke don't fix it, sure — but when endeavoring to do something new, something you haven't done before, something involving risk by definition, it makes good sense to set SMART objectives, explicitly assign roles and responsibilities (even — especially? — in flat organisations; see The Tyranny of Structurelessness for more on this), define requirements and formally communicate with all team members on a regular basis (i.e. consciously and intentionally manage the project).
Thanks again for having me, NI — I had a great time meeting you all and hope to see you all again sometime :)
communitybandwidth, importantprojects, newinternationalist, nptech, phillipsmith, projectmanagement, training
