In this lesson, you’ll hear from Lullabot’s Chief of Operations, Account Director, and several technical project managers about what they think makes a good project manager. These traits of a good PM include: being a great communicator, having the ability to distill a project into tasks, taking initiative to clear blockers for developers, probing stakeholders for requirements, assumptions, and other vital information, demonstrating leadership, and finally being able to have difficult conversations with clients—discussing uncomfortable truths with tact and diplomacy. Are you on the path to becoming a project manager? Or maybe you’re looking to improve your skills? With these insights, learn about the variety of technical and people skills that make for a great project manager.
Additional resources
Want to dive deeper? Here are some books recommended by project managers at Lullabot:
- Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister
- Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management by Scott Berkun
- Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization by Dave Logan, John King & Halee Fischer-Wright
- User Stories Applied: for Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn
- Analysis without Paralysis: 12 Tools to Make Better Strategic Decisions by Babette E Bensoussan & Craig S Fleisher
- Software Estimation by Steve McConnell
- The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
In this lesson, you’ll learn about three types of services contracts: the fixed bid or fixed scope, time and materials, and a retainer-based contract. You’ll also hear about the Iron Triangle: budget, scope, and timeline, and how these elements are controlled or can flex in these different types of agreements. Finally, you’ll learn about how a contract can imply a certain level of trust and how building successful relationships with clients can lead to future, more mutually favorable agreements.
Additional resources
In this lesson, you’ll learn what makes a good estimate and what some good questions are to ask in the estimation process. You’ll also hear about how an estimation process can detect unclear requirements and what kind of communication needs to happen as a result of that discovery. Finally you’ll learn some helpful techniques for estimation that provide just the right amount of detail.
Additional resources
Want to dive deeper? Here are some books recommended by project managers at Lullabot:
Books
- Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister
- Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management by Scott Berkun
- Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization by Dave Logan, John King & Halee Fischer-Wright
- User Stories Applied: for Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn
- Analysis without Paralysis: 12 Tools to Make Better Strategic Decisions by Babette E Bensoussan & Craig S Fleisher
- Software Estimation by Steve McConnell
- The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
Online Resources
- Systems development life cycle
- Scrum Breakfast (blog)
- Agile Software Development .com
- Certifications in Scrum
- Software Effort Estimation Considered Harmful
and on the opposite spectrum: How to Estimate
Templates
Articles by Lullabots
- Building a Development Matrix by Jerad Bitner
- The Art of Estimation by Seth Brown
- An Update on the Art of Estimation by Jerad Bitner
Methods
In this lesson, you’ll learn about the challenge of determining how many people are needed for a project, what questions to ask when determining capacity, and finally signals that may indicate that it’s time to bring others in or remove team members from a project.
Additional resources
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
In this lesson, you’ll learn some strategies for how to put together teams, especially for large projects. You’ll hear about the advantages of organizing a project into work streams, what that means, and how it can be advantageous to break up a large project team into smaller, more efficient groups.
In this lesson, you’ll learn about the human side of project managing; what people skills are important to have, and ways to detect burnout and help team members get back on track.
In this lesson, you will hear a variety of perspectives on the many facets of client communication. As trust directly impacts communication, you will hear about how trust varies depending on the type of project. In difficult conversations, learn about the importance of listening. To build trust and manage tricky situations, learn about transparent, proactive communication of risk factors. On a practical level, you’ll learn about the importance of translating client discussions into action items for the development team, and how the ticket queue can be a great place to capture important discussions and facilitate client communication with the project team.
In this lesson, you will learn some strategies for aligning and managing client expectations from the perspective of sales and account management. Learn how you, as a project manager, can work with an account manager to effectively communicate with a client to find out whether or not expectations are being met.
In this lesson, you’ll learn about the essential elements of a successful project kick-off meeting or on-site, including who should be there and what should be done during this time.
In this lesson, you’ll learn strategies for identifying and dealing with problems, risks, and red flags on a project. You’ll also learn tips for being a proactive and diplomatic communicator, ensuring that progress and velocity is up to speed, and the importance of minding the boundaries of your relationship with the client and how to effectively advocate for the project, without forgetting the people who can ultimately make the project successful.
Additional resources
In this lesson you will learn about different approaches to Quality Assurance (QA), the importance of doing QA throughout the project, and how QA can be used as a basis for documentation and help for the client.
Additional resources
Testing the front end with CasperJS
Automate Your Life with Phing
CSS Regression Testing with Resemble.js
Write A Hello World Test for Drupal 7 with SimpleTest
Automated Testing in Drupal 7 with SimpleTest
Quality Assurance with Selenium
Careful with that Debug Syntax
In this lesson, you’ll learn about demoing your progress to the client and the team, along with some things to consider in a prototyping process. We'll also talk about retrospectives, when the team takes time to review not just the work produced but the process behind it as well.
In this lesson, you’ll learn some tips for ensuring a successful launch and the importance of celebrating the accomplishments of the team.
In this tutorial, I'll introduce the API Blueprint specification and take a look at a few tools we can use to provide documentation and testing for our API.
The tools we'll look at include:
By the end of the tutorial you'll have a better understanding of the API Blueprint specification and be able to use Dredd and Aglio to ensure your API documentation and testing stay up-to-date.
Self-check question: Could you write a script that could be run after every commit that would keep your documentation up-to-date, and provide API test results?
Additional resources
This brief video demonstrates how to use the embedded video feature within a tutorial on our site.
Additional resources
Welcome to Our New Drupal 9 Site
Blog postWelcome to our new Drupal 9 website! We’ve been working hard on this and it’s all paid off today. You’ll see we didn’t redesign the site, so most of the site will look and behave the way it always has. We did make a lot of changes in the backend, and cleaned a bunch of things up.
New Drupal Learning Community
Blog postLast week we launched the Drupalize.Me Community beta and we’d like you to join us. The community is open to everyone, not just Drupalize.Me members.
My esteemed colleague Joe Shindelar has written 2 new tutorials for our existing Migrate to Drupal 9 or 10 course on the migration_lookup process plugin and Migrate API's map tables.
We’re getting ready to run another iteration of our popular Hands-On Drupal Theming workshop on July 19th, 20th, and 21st, something we haven’t done for over a year as we’ve been focused on teaching Drupal 7 to Drupal 9/10 migrations. In the process of getting ready, I’ve been going through my slides for the workshop and making some updates. Here are the things that jump out to me as important (but work-in-progress) changes in the last year.
We're excited to announce a new course, Performance and Scalability for Drupal Sites! This course is a deep dive into the concepts, terminology, tools, and strategies around performance and scalability for Drupal sites. By the end of this course, you will be well-equipped to understand your site's performance and how you can make your Drupal site blazing fast.