Working with Drupal as a Technial Project Manager
About 7 months ago, I started working with the open source project Drupal as a technical project manager, and it’s been a trial by fire experience. My first three projects weren’t the typical content management system builds, they were complex web applications that happened to use the Drupal content framework. Despite the challenges of the projects, I’ve come to love working with Drupal from the project management perspective.
Taking Over as the Drupal Technical Project Manager
Starting out in my current position at Interactive Strategies, I took over several projects as the lead project manager for three very difficult and troubled projects:
- Social network platform for a start up
- Community driven content sharing for scientists
- A major upgrade to an existing retail marketing competitive intelligence platform.
Projects 1 and 2 - Creating a Drupal Distribution
These projects were actually merged together and became what is known as a multi-site installation of Drupal. We actually took the project further and open sourced the entire platform as a Drupal Distribution. This is beyond what most Drupal project managers have had the opportunity to complete. The distribution is a simplified version of Drupal Commons and covers the basic use cases that one might need for a community or social network platform. It’s also very light weight when compared against Commons.
The Challenge: Getting the project on D.O. (that’s inside speak for www.drupal.org) was a very serious internal goal, especially for the development team. One of the clients proved to be the most challenging client I have yet to meet. The project had continuously increasing demands, i.e. the site load as fast as Facebook, while no increases in budget permitted.
The Result: About a year ago we released the first development branch on Drupal.org and is know as Totem. The development team has made tremendous gains in working with the framework and is left far more skilled and efficient.
Project 3 - The Legacy Drupal 6 Update
This project was created for one of the top retailers in the country. A year before I joined Interactive Strategies, they built a platform that is used globally to spot trends in the retail stores. Users (employees) can seek out new retail trends and upload their finds to the website. The executives create personal itineraries from these uploaded trends, so that they can explore the competitive retail market.
The Challenge: The project’s original code base was supposed to be a prototype and was built in less then two months. This makes it very hard to maintain and upgrade appropriately, pretty much a technical project managers worst nightmare. To make matters worse, the project had been outsourced to a different development agency. Since they weren’t the original creators of the project, they had a more challenging time working with the application. This all was combined with a very impatient and highly demanding client.
The Result: I ended up breaking the project down in phases similar to Agile Sprints. I had the outsourced team commit to completing a few of the sprints, while the internal development team was closing out Projects 1 and 2. When the work load lightened up on Projects 1 and 2, we pulled the development back internally.
Closing Remarks
In the end it’s been a very stressful past 7 months, however it’s been a great learning experience. I wouldn’t trade this in for an easier experience because in the end the challenges are enjoyable.