PM FTW: Need-to-See Sessions & BoFs to blow your minds
I’ll never forget the day that I talked to Angie at DrupalCon London and asked her who the community Project Managers were. There were none. I was floored. How could something so essential, useful & critical to success be overlooked? That was the state of our community as I saw it then: nonexistent. Who were the Project Managers in the Drupal Community? I didn’t know a single one in 2011.
Guess what? I do now. It’s so amazing to see so many names come to mind when I think about our PM community niche and to have a mailing list of hundreds of people to reach out to. Know what else is amazing? Our track has had the 2nd largest number of submitted sessions for this Drupalcon. BOOM! If that’s not arriving, then I don’t know what is.
Another fun fact for you: session selection has been extremely difficult. I see that as a very positive thing. When we get so much interest that our stomachs are in knots about having to say no to some really awesome sessions, we know something is being done right.
We hope you will love the track as much as we do. We’ve organized it in such a way that it speaks to PM’s of varying levels of experience. Some sessions are more “PM 101”, others are advanced, and the difficulty of topic progresses along with the con so you can (hopefully) walk in with little more than awareness, and walk out with an incredible amount of basic, intermediate and advanced knowledge.
To keep this momentum going post-conference, we are holding a BoF on Thursday May 12th at 1pm in Room 286 (thanks to Justin Rhodes, our Local Track Chair for suggesting this), as a closing ceremony for this budding community and to promote PM mentorship.
Who should come to the BoF?
Newbies: Join us! Veterans: Come share your know-how! Either way, come to exchange on a variety of Project Management issues.
We want to share our vision with you, and hopefully, inspire you to help us continue to grow the numbers and activities of this group. It would also be very useful for us as chairs to get your immediate feedback about the track so we can, ourselves, iterate on our selection process and give you more of what you want to see.
We hope you’ll join us for the sessions and BoF, and encourage you to hold your own BoF’s! We want to thank you, PM’s, for stepping up to the plate and getting involved. You are all wonderful to me, and I love being right about us needing a “voice” at the conference of the year for many of us. Most of all, we want to thank the DA for making this track possible, and for hearing our pleas for sessions.
In typical Shan fashion, I’ll end this blog post with a bunch of things I wish I could see from the community so you can go hold BoF’s, or write sessions and share your personal project intelligence with the masses. Steal these ideas, go do great things with them!
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Is Project Manager a dirty word now that Scrum Master is popular?
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What is the next PM disruption? Are we on the verge of replacing Agile with a new way of thinking? (My gut says yes.)
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Freelance Project Management: a guide, pro’s & con’s.
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PM tricks up your sleeve: what’s in your “must have” list of tools & techniques?
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Share your story: Best & Worst clients you’ve ever had & why, what did you learn from them?
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Never, ever do this: your warning war stories & how they made you a better PM
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Community Project Management is tough & how to win at it
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Whatever you think will help PM’s everywhere in this community & beyond!
Thank you all, and have a great conference!
Shannon Vettes, global project management track co-chair along with Ashleigh Thevenet, and Local Track chair, Justin Rhodes