Act Like a Leader Before You Are One!

If you want to become a leader, one could begin to act, think, and communicate it long before that promotion.

Yes! the lines and the title are being inspired by Amy Gallo's [1] article and I second with the writer. In one of our last project , my organization took the risk of going with the idea of  a "Team without a project manager". And I, along with few other fellow colleagues were part of it. The idea sounded really interesting and challenging at the same time. Though we initially had the privilege of having a scrum master during the discovery phase of the project but post [2]sprint 0, the team was without any SM's/ PM. During the entire phase, the team was responsible for handling client , presenting demo's , visiting client-site ,creating and refurbishing backlog, conduct self- retros & using project management tools.

In this session, I would discuss the challenges we faced during the entire project cycle.

Key topics-

1. Moving to Kanban Approach to meet day to day request from the clients. Using different project management tools like JIRA and Trello.
2. Handling team conflicts and dealing with the clients.
3. Selfless leadership display from the management who kept on supporting the team throughout the entire project cycle.
4. How we contributed back to the community meeting deadlines and client expectation. Though we were full of work and had minimal time but we decided to spend at least an hour in a week to test issues on Drupal.org and looked for contributing projects to the community with new 3rd party integration involved in the projects.

Overall, the session would display how the transition of a team to a self-managed team took place. Overcoming challenges and stepping in as a leader of own in a difficult situation.

To attend the session, you could be from any walk of life with any kind of experience. We might be wrong or correct for many instances. We would like to hear your feedback as well post this informative session.