Survival Skills for Real-World Project Management
Bring your JIRA boards, your Scrum cards and, yes, even your waterfalls. This session will share tools and techniques to help you keep on top of your projects no matter what general methodology your organization follows.
With deadline pressure, technical difficulties, scope creep and team dynamics in the mix, projects can grow and evolve on a daily basis. How can we stop them from growing into monsters?
Drawing from experiences such as managing launches for The Weather Channel and the NFL together in one summer, we will review how and where to apply things like simple list-making to stay in control. We will share the daily survival skills we teach to our project management team, such as:
- How to stay organized through the power of the daily priority list
- How to check in with a developer to evaluate true status
- Ticket best practices to improve consistency
- How to scan the code repository to identify and remove blockers
- Speaking from data to calm nervous clients
- Effective recap e-mails to manage scope and budget
- Managing a product backlog to maintain clear priorities
- Burn rate woes and how to fix them
About the Presenters
Kelly Dassing is a Customer Success Manager at Mediacurrent and has been in client services for Drupal projects for more than five years. Kelly is a Certified Scrum Product Owner and serves as primary point of contact for both client stakeholders and development teams for Habitat for Humanity, Mercy College, and the University of Georgia, among others.
Jeff Diecks is the COO at Mediacurrent and has two decades of experience managing projects for the web. Jeff helps manage the team's delivery for clients including The Weather Channel, Georgia Tech, Verifone, Harvard and more.