No longer lost in translation: how to convert business requirements into Drupal-speak

One of the most challenging aspects of building (and scoping!) a Drupal site is translating what a non-technical client requests into actual requirements that can be built by overly-technically-literate developers. 

Here’s the thing, though: it actually isn’t really that hard. Drupal has a wide variety of simple recipes for handling what are rather logical and basic requests from clients. The difficulty is that both parties are speaking entirely different languages, and a huge amount of what is needed on both sides is lost in translation.

What we will cover: 

This session is about finding our way out of the confusion by mapping common linguistic tendencies used by clients into the Drupal-speak that is needed to employ best-practices in site building and systems architecture.

We will explore ways to understand the psyche of the client so that we can break down the essence of their real request (rather than the typically very odd sounding thing they actually stated).

Our goal is to translate what the client says into what they actually need, which are often very different things. From there, we will then identify the common Drupal site-building recipes that map to very standard requests.

Who is this talk for:

Business analysts, site builders, project managers, and clients. Anyone who feels that they experience frustration getting from a general feature request to an actual implementation plan.

What you will come away with: 

• If you are a project manager: a translation toolset to help break down the real meaning of client requests.
• If you are a site builder: ideally, a way to better scope and engineer solutions for client requests. 
• If you are a client: a better understanding of how the engineers working on your site think, and the language they use.