This session is for business leaders, institutional administrators, procurement specialists, and managers who need to understand the basics of how to think about and run a successful Drupal project from start to finish. The assumption is that you will not be doing the actual design, site-building, and development yourself. Instead, this talk will focus on putting together a strategy and building a team to meet both short and long term business goals.
This session will touch on:
- The early planning stages
- The pitfalls of viewing Drupal as a CMS
- Capturing requirements
- Arriving at a budget range
- The RFP dilemma
- Leveraging internal resources
- Working with freelancers
- Bringing in outside vendors
- Understanding the basics of waterfall and agile philosophies
- The design phase
- The development phase
- Quality assurance & formal testing
- Ongoing maintenance and support
- Building an internal support and development team
While this session touches the surface on a wide range of material and strategy, it is not intended to cover any single topic in-depth. This session should be viewed as an introductory roadmap to acquiring a deeper understanding of Drupal project management. Additional resources will be provided during the presentation for those interested in delving deeper into the topics.
About the Speaker:
Nathan Kirschbaum is Knectar’s Senior Interactive Producer and Drupal Consultant. He has led numerous business and enterprise-level web projects, working in recent years with organizations such as Harvard Medical School, Tufts, and MIT. Nathan is currently the technical project lead for the Drupal 7 based Jackdaniels.com global CMS project. He contributes regularly to the Drupal community and is an active member of the Drupal Association.
