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

Like I said in my last post, I'm on sabbatical this year, but today's still the fifth anniversary of Important Projects!

In keeping with tradition, I made a vegan chocolate cake to celebrate :)

If I've worked with you at any point over the last five years, I'm thinking fondly of you today :)

anniversary, birthday, importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment

Apologies for recent silence — it's been quite a while since my last post! There are reasons for that, though — some big changes in both my professional and personal life have kept me busy for the past few weeks :)

First: I've left the UK and moved to New York City! My partner has been transferred here to join another group within her company and I've followed — I believe in the benefits of co-location ;)

Next: I'm taking a one year sabbatical from Important Projects. For me, moving to New York has meant getting a work visa, which is pretty difficult to do so if you're self-employed — much easier to do if you find an organisation to hire you for a long-ish contract, work with you on the paperwork, etc.

So: I've taken a one year contract with The Economist to help them move to Drupal and to adopt Scrum!

It's an exciting opportunity for me — the work The Economist will do to move to Drupal will benefit the Drupal community (The Economist has a very progressive open source strategy, IMO), which will, by extension, help NGOs using Drupal. The experience I gain in helping The Economist adopt Scrum will help me help NGOs adopt Scrum (which I believe NGOs should do, not just because of the benefits, but because of the inherent values of Scrum — more on this in a later post).

I'll miss the friends I've made in London over the past 3 years, but look forward to seeing them when I'm back there from time to time, and I'm happy to report that
Drupal for NGOs will live on — thank you in advance for taking over organising responsibilities Robert Castelo et al :)

I still plan to post here when I feel I have something interesting to say, and until then, all the best! And let me know if you're ever in New York :)

agile, drupal, enterprisescrum, importantprojects, nptech, opensource, projectmanagement, scrum

Today I took the bus to Brixton and spent the morning talking about two of my favourite subjects — risk management and iterative and incremental development — with the web team at CAFOD!

Branislava (pictured below, sorting index cards) and her team are about to undertake a couple of very large projects and invited me over to talk about how they might manage the associated risks by delivering each project incrementally (i.e. bit by bit) and iteratively (i.e. with time set aside to revise and improve the bits).

Sure — all projects involve risk (i.e. uncertain events or conditions that, should they occur, will have a positive or negative effect on the project's objectives), but the days of developing an entire system (or systems) with "big bang" integration testing at the end are OVER, right? Well they should be.

Thanks for having me, CAFOD!

agile, CAFOD, importantprojects, incrementaldevelopment, iterativedevelopment, nptech, projectmanagement, riskmanagement, scrum, training

Hug your project manager today! Project managers work to improve your quality of life by helping you work together with your team more effectively!

Happy International Project Management Day 2008!

importantprojects, internationalprojectmanagementday, nptech, projectmanagement

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

Today is November 1st, World Vegan Day, and the start of World Vegan Month!

Happy World Vegan Day and World Vegan Month! Vegan catering for all!

activism, environment, food, green, importantprojects, noanimalproducts, sustainability, vegan, worldveganday2008

Thanks for coming out to Drupal for NGOs at Development House last night! Those were some great presentations (from Anna Feldman of GreenNet, David Gildeh on the work he did for Ashoka and Thomas Muirhead of Macmillan Cancer Support)!

And speaking of presentations, I'm thinking maybe next month we shouldn't have any presentations — instead, I'm thinking we should run a couple of workshops, or run an open space meeting around how we can really start to benefit from being part of this community we've built over the last few months. Let me think about it some more. Watch for details here and/or on the Drupal UK site!

Happy Halloween!

developmenthouse, drupal, drupalforngos, greennet, importantprojects, opensource, nptech, softwaredevelopment

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

Just a quick post to thank everyone for coming out to Drupal for NGOs on Monday — great to see/meet you! You are one motley crew (see above).

Thanks as well to our presenters, Oliver McColl of GCAP and Francesco Moretto, and to the very nice people at Comic Relief UK for hosting us! Thank you all :)

Preparations for our October meeting are now underway — watch for details here and/or on the Drupal UK site!

comicrelief, drupal, drupalforngos, importantprojects, opensource, nptech, softwaredevelopment

From Driving Fear Out of the Workplace: Creating the High-Trust, High-Performance Organization, by Daniel Oestreich and Kathleen Ryan.

importantprojects, nptech, officepolitics, politics, projectmanagement

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

Alright! The next meeting of Drupal for NGOs will be held at the Comic Relief UK offices near Vauxhall 34 days from today!

Presentations for September are TBD (and please contact me if you'd like to present) — watch the event page or the Eventbrite registration page for more details as things come together :)

If you can't make the meeting but want to join us at the pub afterwards, we'll be at the Morpeth Arms (and thank you, Dan Duke of Comic Relief, for the recommendation).

UPDATE: Oliver MacColl of GCAP will present! Still looking for one more presenter. Francesco Moretto will travel from Milan to present on using CiviCRM with Drupal! 18 11 4 tickets remain The event is now sold out!

comicrelief, drupal, drupalforngos, importantprojects, opensource, nptech, softwaredevelopment

I'm going on holiday! Tomorrow! I can't remember taking a vacation in the last 5 years but tomorrow Frankie and I are taking the train to Cornwall and staying for 10 days. See you when we get back :)

importantprojects, holiday, howbaddoineedthis, vacation