Drupal Project Management With Remote Teams

We know that there are excellent tools available to help us stay in touch and share information. We also know about the many benefits of a seamless, remote agency. But managing remote team collaborations—like a Developer in India, a Themer in UAE, a QA Tester in Ukraine, a Project Manager in Israel, and the client in France—requires more than typical, traditional management skills.

Distributed team project management means tailoring. The cultures on the team can vary, meaning communication needs special attention. Approaches need to be more proactive, engagements need to be lively, and timings should be strategic.

This session will help you understand the unknowns of remote working and help your projects and your teams be successful and even more productive. We will be discussing the usual suspects for any kind of management but with the emphasis on the differences required for remote managing.

• How to encourage your team to be self-organized

• Channeling globalization and the mix of people on your team

• How to use Agile project management skills

• Tips on how to manage time zone differences to avoid bottlenecks

• How to motivate and enable distributed teams

• How to spice up engagement (keep things from being boring)

Shani Memfy has been managing international project delivery since 1999. She’s worked in agile for over three years as a certified Scrum Master and Scrum Product Owner. Her average project spans across three time zones and has her working directly with client Product Owners to manage teams of four to seven specialists. Off work you can find her on the court, shooting hoops with a local Netball league. Shani lives in a suburban city in Israel  30 minutes from Tel Aviv with her husband and their beautiful children.

Michael Cannon is Peichi’s smiling man, Drusus’ Baba, an adventurous water-rat, Axelerant’s Chief Operating Officer, cyclist, Peimic.com founder, photographer, poet, and world traveler. He started coding in 1984 and has since evolved to mentoring and strategic roles.

As part of his love to help others by sharing his experiences, he speaks about how organizational culture and technology choices can interrelate to solve a wide variety of business problems. When he isn’t doing that, you’ll find him photographing open source event around the globe for the evangelization of our Open Source communities.