Large scale Drupal projects are a special breed of Drupal project typically found with large enterprise customers. They involve managing multiple initiatives, partners, stakeholders and product owners. When development is performed by round-the-clock, globally distributed teams, project management complexity compounds. It’s critical that everyone understands the part they need to play. When executing projects with this scale, it can become challenging to maintain efficient agile workflows.
To give your next large scale project team a head start, we've identified processes and methodology improvements that can be easily implemented to make your Drupal project successful. In this webinar, we’ll discuss how an effective Drupal project manager can keep everyone on task, on track, and prepared for worst case scenarios.
Specifically, we’ll:
-Review key elements of communication that uphold the agile process
-Discuss elements of good team management: from delivery and infrastructure support to product owner and stakeholder
-Talk through key tools and practices to keep your project humming
Acquia's official PPT template begins here.
This is the standard presentation title slide.
Where were successes made?
How were challenges surmounted?
Having multiple product owners means having to juggle priorities. Who’s tickets are the most important?
Does that change from sprint to sprint?
How is that communicated, so that everyone knows?
Feedback I’ve heard or seen:
release planning meeting helped
1:1 meetings with individual product owners
Call out inconsistent participation with team
Review user story writing
Encourage Documentation in JIRA tickets
Google Document connected with tickets in draft and under discussion
----- Meeting Notes (11/16/16 22:51) -----
Key to have priorities spelled out ahead of time to make the process as mooth as possible for everyone on the team.
Clear communications.
It is all about managing multiple expectations
How is the progress of the project demonstrated and communicated?
Do you rely on the product owners to perform this?
Do different stakeholders expect different results?
getting the client to be more agile
agile workshops - understanding terminology and general process
user stories good foundation block
using sub-tasks and tasks for reminders and non-development based tasks
How can you keep various teams up to date with latest information without burdening everyone with too many "status" meetings?
Key elements of the agile workflow we use come with only three key meetings: the daily scrum, review and retrospective
Automated or Behat testing is more and more critical to a successful project
Accommodating this in the development cycle therefore is important
Documenting what are the Top level process workflow & expectations
JIRA Workflow states – what are the expectations; who watches those states; who is expected to own those tickets (ex. Code Review or QA or UAT)
Use a tool like Howdy with Slack to automate the daily standup call. Having a large group can drag things down.
If necessary, separate scrums by region and rotate responsibilities for a scrum of scrums call or checkin
Acquia provides customers with Technical Account Managers to help bridge the gap between Delivery teams and Support and often are tasked to handle these kinds of requests
Who owns tickets in which workflow state
Team Contacts and Dev Roster (pivot table for managing distribution lists)
Sprint ceremonies: scrum notes, grooming agendas, retrospectives
RACI or RASCI
Top level process workflow & expectations
JIRA Workflow states
Spikes vs Tracer Bullets
Hotfixes
Developer documentation - set aside a timeboxed, small effort ticket to document a feature or Epic as it is near or at completion. Make this a stretch task
How to prevent excessive documentation overhead?
----- Meeting Notes (11/16/16 22:51) -----
Make sure to cover grooming agendas for managing multiple product owners
Confluence – integrates really well with JIRA to make documentation around tickets easier. Prepare documents with automatically updating tables of tickets: listing of all tickets in the last few sprints specific to work around a key Feature.
Google Drive – allows for sharing permissions to be different – between teams, clients or everyone on the project
For both of these, around grooming – prepare documents linking to tickets in discussion or review
In JIRA, create Hidden Epic – specifically designated so that tickets for features that are still congealing or being explored are not accidentally reviewed or sized ahead of their time. Treat like a personal sandbox.
Pointing poker (pointingpoker.com, play.planningpoker.com)