Project management consulting and training for social change organisations.
At DrupalCon DC in March I got to meet Kent Bye of Lullabot face-to-face for the first time, which was great (great to meet all the Lullabots I hadn't met in person before, actually, and to catch up with the rest of them).
Kent interviewed me for the Drupal Voices podcast — I got to talk about the Drupal projects I've worked on in the past, about Drupal for NGOs and about Scrum.
I think I'd had a bit too much coffee that morning but Kent did a good job of editing out the bits I was especially worried about — take a listen!
agile, drupal, drupalforngos, importantprojects, lullabot, nptech, projectmanagement, scrum, softwaredevelopment
Last week I took the train to Machynlleth, Wales to spend two days talking about Scrum with Tincan, a conscious business specialising in the design, development and hosting of websites for not-for-profit arts organisations (like the National Theatre). They're also the makers of PHPList!
Tincan have offices in the UK and in Argentina and invited me to talk with them about how they might make their already-Agile development practices more effective by using Scrum on some of their larger and/or more product-based projects. Because their office in Machynlleth is at the southern end of Snowdonia National Park, Francesca came with me so we could spend the weekend hiking in the hills there — highly recommended if you're ever in the area :)
Thanks for having me, Tincan!
agile, importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, scrum, tincan, training
A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by Kathleen Ryan O'Connor for the "Do Good" series she's writing over at Projects@Work.com (a US-based project management site). You have to register to read the whole article (and I'm called Rod in the first paragraph which my friends will probably call me from now on) but I'm pretty happy with it — I talk a bit about the relationship between shared values and project management, the importance of understanding organisational culture, about Drupal for NGOs (the next meeting is this Thursday, BTW) and bit about Scrum.
Thanks for the interview, Kathleen!
importantprojects, nptech, principles, projects, projectmanagement, scrum, values, valuesbasedprojectmanagement
Concern FAST is an annual fundraising campaign run by Concern Worldwide involving thousands of people and hundreds of schools in Ireland. Participants register to fast for a day and their friends and families to sponsor them to do so — Concern then uses the money (more than €1,000,000.00 is raised every year) to help people living in extreme poverty in some of the poorest countries in the world.
The Concern FAST 2008 campaign is up and running now! Concern hopes to raise €1,300,000.00 between now and January 31st (the actual day of fasting is December 4th) and this year, they're running the online component of the campaign on open source software — I worked with Concern and Enable Interactive to build http://concernfast.org in Drupal and CiviCRM using Scrum!
If you live in Ireland and want to help Concern fight hunger and poverty in the developing world, take part!
blogactionday, blogactionday2008, concern, concernfast2008, civicrm, drupal, enableinteractive, importantprojects, hunger, malnutrition, nptech, opensource, poverty, projectmanagement, scrum, softwaredevelopment, starvation
Last Friday I travelled to Woodstock, Oxfordshire to spend the morning talking about Scrum with a dozen or so representatives of OLM Group, the UK's largest independent supplier of social care products and services (including Bettercaring, which I believe my friends at Enable originally built — nice one, fellas).
One of the divisions of OLM Group is already using Scrum, so the morning was really an opportunity for me to acknowledge the good work that group is already doing, honor their courage for undertaking such a cultural/paradigmatic change, and to reinforce the organisational/business value Scrum can help teams deliver by agreeing to follow just a few simple rules (i.e. make everything visible, frequently inspect outcomes and adapt the process as necessary).
I love simple rules because as chaordic visionary Dee Hock once said:
Thanks for having me, OLM!
agile, importantprojects, nptech, olmgroup, projectmanagement, scrum, training
Last Thursday I took the train to Charlbury and spent the day talking about SMART objectives and Scrum with the project managers and account directors at Torchbox, a 25-or-so person conscious business specialising in the design and development of websites and Internet software for socially and environmentally progressive organisations. They've built a few Drupal sites in the last little while as well and are extremely lovely people to boot!
Thanks for having me, Torchbox — I had a fantastic time meeting and speaking with you and hope to see you all again soon! Hopefully tomorrow at the second installment of Drupal for NGOs ;-)
agile, importantprojects, torchbox, nptech, projectmanagement, scrum, smart, training
I almost forgot to mention — I'm now a Certified ScrumMaster! I took the 2 day training course with Nigel Baker of AgileBear 2 weeks ago and am a changed man ;-)
You don't need ScrumMaster Certification to manage projects with Scrum (IMHO), but if you're using Scrum with a team that hasn't used Scrum before, I highly recommend bringing in a professional trainer to take the team through an overview of the framework at the outset of the project — we brought Nigel in to train the entire Concern web team last month and it was money and time well spent :)
agile, agilebear, certification, CSM, importantprojects, nigelbaker, nptech, projectmanagement, scrum, scrummaster, softwaredevelopment
A couple of months ago I mentioned I'd started working with Concern Worldwide on a pretty massive Drupal/CiviCRM project and was excited about the work we'd done in defining our objectives. We're now just one week away from completing our first development sprint, and although I'm pretty much all about that at this point, I still want to write about the objectives we've set for the project (and especially today — long story but I had to bow out of my faculty position at Social Tech Training in Toronto this week where I was meant to lead a session on setting objectives... Christopher Roy has kindly agreed to deliver the session on my behalf and I guess writing this now is partly an attempt to be there in spirit).
Notwithstanding the fact that many project teams very often forget or intentionally skip setting objectives, taking the time to set them is important for a number of reasons:
Collective focus on project outcomes is pretty critical to project success, and setting objectives allows us to achieve collective focus, so we set them. That is, we should set them — a lot of teams don't set objectives because they find it hard, or because they don't know how, or because they'd rather just "get on with it" (and deal with the consequences later — bad).
To make setting objectives on your projects easier, I've done a bit of research and put together the following step-by-step instructions. Enjoy!
Step 1. Understand organisational/program goals
Back in 2006, I don't think I really understood the difference between objectives and goals. This is pretty (embarrassingly) clear if you go back and look at the "objectives" set for the Drupal migration project I worked on with Greenpeace UK that year. Those weren't objectives; those were goals. Goals and objectives are different1:
Objectives map onto goals. And once met, objectives contribute to the achievement of goals. So before you set project objectives, you should really understand the overarching goals of the organisation undertaking the project, or the goals of the program of which the project is a part. Right?
The project I'm working on right now with Concern is part of its "Next-Generation Web" (NGW) program (i.e. it is one of many projects to be undertaken by Concern as part of the NGW program), which has the following goals:
To contribute to the achievement of these goals by a certain date and for a certain amount of money, we've set some narrow, specific, short term and measurable objectives for our project :)
Step 2. Define SMART objectives
Narrow, specific, short term and measurable objectives are good, but SMART2 objectives are even better. SMART objectives are objectives that are:
With Concern we've used the following format for defining our SMART project objectives, which I think has worked well and which I recommend using:
By [INSERT DATE], [INSERT WHO] will have [INSERT WHAT] resulting in [INSERT RESULTS] by [INSERT DATE].
Without the actual values inserted the above doesn't seem to have a lot of, well, value, I realise — here are the three SMART objectives we set for our project (I've removed the measurements because they're for internal use only at this point, but you'll get the picture):
It took us a bit of time to figure these out, a bit of discipline, but we got through it, and once done, we were able to validate our work by testing for SMARTness :)
Once you've written your SMART project objectives, it's good to test them as a team, or even better, with stakeholders on the project but external to the core team (i.e. those who may influence outcomes but who are not part of the day-to-day). Get them in a room or on the phone with you and test each objective one by one. Like so3:
One of the huge benefits to going through a process like this is determining whether the objectives you've set for your project are relevant — in my experience when teams do set objectives they often set them for people other than themselves, objectives they don't actually have the ability to achieve (e.g. objectives having to do with organisational changes they'd like to see happen but can't really influence). That and measurability. You've got to set measurable objectives. Even though you could be long gone before the outcomes of your project become measurable. SMART objectives are measurable if nothing else :)
Download this post as a PDF: 
HOW TO Set SMART Objectives (108 KB)
Endnotes:
1Goal vs. Objective — Difference and Comparison (n.d.). Retrieved June 24, 2008, from http://www.diffen.com/difference/Goal_vs_Objective.
2SMART (project management) (n.d.). Retrieved June 24, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_(project_management).
3Setting SMART Objectives (n.d.). Retrieved June 24, 2008, from http://www.thepracticeofleadership.net/2006/03/11/setting-smart-objectives/.
concern, civicrm, drupal, importantprojects, nptech, objectives, projectmanagement, SMART, softwaredevelopment, STT
Last month when I was in New Orleans for 08NTC I got a call from Enable Interactive in Bristol asking if I wanted to co-pitch with them on a very large CMS/CRM project for Concern Worldwide. We talked about it more when I got back to London, then went for it, then won the contract — w00t!
We were in Dublin at Concern's head office on Monday for the kick-off meeting and I've just spent the last two days in Bristol getting to know the Enable team and working with the folks at Concern to define the objectives for the project (which I'll blog about in another post — I'm quite excited about the work we've done there).
We're still working out our high-level plan for the next several months, but basically we're moving all of Concern's sites to Drupal, very likely integrating with CiviCRM and then with a number of existing systems as well. And we'll being following Scrum to get it all done (and I'm currently looking for an outstanding Scrum trainer in Dublin or London to train the entire team on the framework/process — if you are one or know one please get in touch with me).
Should be fun :-)
concern, civicrm, drupal, enableinteractive, importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, scrum, 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
Today I'm heading to New York City to attend Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects, a sold-out, first-of-its-kind, two-day not-for-profit technology project management conference hosted by Aspiration and Idealware. Needless to say I am psyched — I've wanted to participate in a conference like this one for a very long time :)
I get to facilitate three sessions while I'm there as well — one called PM Principles: Values-Based Project Management (where I'll pick up where I left off at Web of Change last fall), another called The Art and Science of Defining Scope (run don't walk) and another called Agile Project Management (where I'll be keen to share some of the things I learned last year managing Project IMPACT for Amnesty using Scrum).
I'm also very excited to meet Laura S. Quinn (who I've spoken to over Skype but never met in person) and Gunner (who I've heard is the single best facilitator in nptech). Thoughts and photos when I return :)
aspiration, aspirationtech, conference, idealware, importantprojects, MNTP, nptech, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment
I think this is my what — fourth post on Project IMPACT since I started working on it back in January? It's been such an intense and challenging project I simply haven't had time to blog about it properly (or about much of anything else come to think of it — my apologies, Alex, for not responding to your Basecamp workflow or Web of Change session notes yet).
The update, then: we're now heading into our fifth of five development sprints with CivicActions (we've been using Scrum to manage the technical development stream of the project — lots of valuable lessons learned there to relay another time) and are finally beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel (for the last five months, we've been working to completely rebuild http://amnesty.org in Drupal, integrate the new site with CiviCRM, and to integrate Drupal with Alfresco, the open source document management system Amnesty has selected as a replacement to its existing repository of 100,000+ reports).
Next week, Jenn and Jacob of CivicActions come back to London, the week after that we'll be joined by Sam, and I'm hoping that when we're all in a room together instead of a bunch of different time zones, I'll actually have a chance to blog about the project in more detail. And until then I really should get back to work :)
alfresco, amnestyinternational, civicactions, civicrm, crm, cms, drupal, humanrights, impact, importantprojects, nptech, open source, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment
