Project management consulting and training for social change organisations.
Today I took the bus to Brixton and spent the morning talking about two of my favourite subjects — risk management and iterative and incremental development — with the web team at CAFOD!
Branislava (pictured below, sorting index cards) and her team are about to undertake a couple of very large projects and invited me over to talk about how they might manage the associated risks by delivering each project incrementally (i.e. bit by bit) and iteratively (i.e. with time set aside to revise and improve the bits).
Sure — all projects involve risk (i.e. uncertain events or conditions that, should they occur, will have a positive or negative effect on the project's objectives), but the days of developing an entire system (or systems) with "big bang" integration testing at the end are OVER, right? Well they should be.
Thanks for having me, CAFOD!
agile, CAFOD, importantprojects, incrementaldevelopment, iterativedevelopment, nptech, projectmanagement, riskmanagement, scrum, training
Today is International Project Management day, a day that is:
Hug your project manager today! Project managers work to improve your quality of life by helping you work together with your team more effectively!
Happy International Project Management Day 2008!
importantprojects, internationalprojectmanagementday, nptech, projectmanagement
Last week I took the train to Machynlleth, Wales to spend two days talking about Scrum with Tincan, a conscious business specialising in the design, development and hosting of websites for not-for-profit arts organisations (like the National Theatre). And they're also the makers of PHPList!
Tincan have offices in the UK and in Argentina and invited me to talk with them about how they might make their already-Agile development practices more effective by using Scrum on some of their larger and/or more product-based projects. Because their office in Machynlleth is at the southern end of Snowdonia National Park, Francesca came with me so we could spend the weekend hiking in the hills there — highly recommended if you're ever in the area :)
Thanks for having me, Tincan!
agile, importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, scrum, tincan, training
Today is November 1st, World Vegan Day, and the start of World Vegan Month!
Happy World Vegan Day and World Vegan Month! Vegan catering for all!
activism, environment, food, green, importantprojects, noanimalproducts, sustainability, vegan, worldveganday2008
Thanks for coming out to Drupal for NGOs at Development House last night! Those were some great presentations (from Anna Feldman of GreenNet, David Gildeh on the work he did for Ashoka and Thomas Muirhead of Macmillan Cancer Support)!
And speaking of presentations, I'm thinking maybe next month we shouldn't have any presentations — instead, I'm thinking we should run a couple of workshops, or run an open space meeting around how we can really start to benefit from being part of this community we've built over the last few months. Let me think about it some more. Watch for details here and/or on the Drupal UK site!
Happy Halloween!
developmenthouse, drupal, drupalforngos, greennet, importantprojects, opensource, nptech, softwaredevelopment
A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by Kathleen Ryan O'Connor for the "Do Good" series she's writing over at Projects@Work.com (a US-based project management site). You have to register to read the whole article (and I'm called Rod in the first paragraph which my friends will probably call me from now on) but I'm pretty happy with it — I talk a bit about the relationship between shared values and project management, the importance of understanding organisational culture, about Drupal for NGOs (the next meeting is this Thursday, BTW) and bit about Scrum.
Thanks for the interview, Kathleen!
importantprojects, nptech, principles, projects, projectmanagement, scrum, values, valuesbasedprojectmanagement
Concern FAST is an annual fundraising campaign run by Concern Worldwide involving thousands of people and hundreds of schools in Ireland. Participants register to fast for a day and their friends and families to sponsor them to do so — Concern then uses the money (more than €1,000,000.00 is raised every year) to help people living in extreme poverty in some of the poorest countries in the world.
The Concern FAST 2008 campaign is up and running now! Concern hopes to raise €1,300,000.00 between now and January 31st (the actual day of fasting is December 4th) and this year, they're running the online component of the campaign on open source software — I worked with Concern and Enable Interactive to build http://concernfast.org in Drupal and CiviCRM using Scrum!
If you live in Ireland and want to help Concern fight hunger and poverty in the developing world, take part!
blogactionday, blogactionday2008, concern, concernfast2008, civicrm, drupal, enableinteractive, importantprojects, hunger, malnutrition, nptech, opensource, poverty, projectmanagement, scrum, softwaredevelopment, starvation
Just a quick post to thank everyone for coming out to Drupal for NGOs on Monday — great to see/meet you! You are one motley crew (see above).
Thanks as well to our presenters, Oliver McColl of GCAP and Francesco Moretto, and to the very nice people at Comic Relief UK for hosting us! Thank you all :)
Preparations for our October meeting are now underway — watch for details here and/or on the Drupal UK site!
comicrelief, drupal, drupalforngos, importantprojects, opensource, nptech, softwaredevelopment
From Driving Fear Out of the Workplace: Creating the High-Trust, High-Performance Organization, by Daniel Oestreich and Kathleen Ryan.
importantprojects, nptech, officepolitics, politics, projectmanagement
Last Friday I travelled to Woodstock, Oxfordshire to spend the morning talking about Scrum with a dozen or so representatives of OLM Group, the UK's largest independent supplier of social care products and services (including Bettercaring, which I believe my friends at Enable originally built — nice one, fellas).
One of the divisions of OLM Group is already using Scrum, so the morning was really an opportunity for me to acknowledge the good work that group is already doing, honor their courage for undertaking such a cultural/paradigmatic change, and to reinforce the organisational/business value Scrum can help teams deliver by agreeing to follow just a few simple rules (i.e. make everything visible, frequently inspect outcomes and adapt the process as necessary).
I love simple rules because as chaordic visionary Dee Hock once said:
Thanks for having me, OLM!
agile, importantprojects, nptech, olmgroup, projectmanagement, scrum, training
