Things I didn’t know that I didn’t know as a PM: Migrating from Lithium to Drupal

DrupalCon Session Proposal: Project Management – Migration

In September of 2014, the Norton Community Forums (https://community.norton.com) migrated from Lithium’s Social Community platform to a home-grown solution using Drupal. It was a tall order, moving from a pre-made feature-rich forum to something completely unknown to us. None of us had ever used Scrum, didn’t know a thing about Drupal, and found ourselves drowning very quickly. But in the 2 years since we began development, we’ve emerged as a highly effective group within the company, despite having 3rd party development, a team in 5 different time zones, and a tight budget.

This session will start the audience on a journey, from the decision to move from Lithium to Drupal, through the short development process, through launch, the first few months of a live new site, and the continuing development work on the site. It will help PMs see the potential at their disposal, and introduce them to a good way to work with development teams, be they in-house or 3rd party.

It will also have the twists and turns you might expect: the drama of dealing with hot-headed customers who threaten to leave the site if we move! The intrigue of who will pay the development costs! The suspense of whether the site will be done by the launch date!

Additionally, the audience will empathize hearing about a very inexperienced Project Manager who learned things the hard way, and still managed to keep everyone (mostly) happy. The heart of the story is about balancing a PM’s different “pulling forces”, and facilitating their communication so these external forces can work together instead of just negating each other.

This session will break down these forces and answer some tough but obvious questions:

Development Management:

• Which core functionality is important for your forums? And to whom are we most accountable? Customers/Employees/Stakeholders?
• Which functionality would drive away core contributors? Which functionality is required to keep them around? Is there a minimum threshold for launch? Long term?
• Beta testing – who do you trust?
• What potential is available for launch? What potential do we have long term?

Business Management:

• Identify and satisfy key stakeholders
• Seek new stakeholders; help them see the value and potential
• Lock in stakeholder investment
• Demonstrate the value

Community/Engagement Management:

• Anticipated mass exodus; who will stay, and who will go? Why are they leaving?
• Open lines of communication early; if they are actively helping (beta testing) the new site, are they motivated to stay? Does giving them a say help or hurt?

By the end of the session, Project Managers (and those preparing for the role) will know how to survive a platform migration with most of their sanity intact. They will learn which common traps to avoid, simple tactics to improve success, and the benefits of embracing the change to Drupal.