Business and Strategy

Estimates are the cornerstones of good project planning. A constant struggle exists to determine accurate estimates, weighing all of the known factors and considering the impact of the unknowns. Nothing feels better than starting off with estimates you can count on, but what if they are actually not accurate at all? In this session I will discuss why I find that wrong estimates can be as valuable as accurate ones.

Some of the estimation topics to be explored in this session

What happens when you lead developer pings you with an “Uh oh, something is amiss with this site” or when you hear from a client that Google is reporting their site as malicious? Reaction mode kicks in, but in order to properly evaluate the situation you have to have a plan for moving forward.

When bad things happen to a site you are responsible for, the response is critical. Project Managers must have a different perspective to solve all of the issues and it must be on sound footing. 

If the World Bank publishes a PDF and no one ever downloads it, does it make an impact (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/08/the-solutions-to-all-our-problems-may-be-buried-in-pdfs-that-nobody-reads)?

The key to finding solutions to common problems encountered in invisible construction projects is simple: better communication. In practice, it can be tricky and requires a lot of nuances. I’ve found that framing these problems into 4 main categories of problems has been a helpful first step to strategizing communications for solving. 

Implemented for United Nations

- Affinity Circles

- Key Influences

- Text Mining

- Visualizations

Visualizing unstructured content and usage of machine learning toolkits for text mining 

Implementing Successful Social Learning Platforms - Lessons from the Trenches

- Educating the Audience of the benefits of Social & Peer based Learning

- Praradigm Shift. Ensuring the leadership recognizes the changing consumerization of learning

- Getting buy-in from the workforce

We will talk about how we succesfully built a social intranet without actually documenting the requirements (not really!). Our team created a series of custom surveys based on workshops with 8 different deparments, and have these varied team provide responses, which we visualized. Voila! We built consensus. The results were for everyone to see, and rating/raking of features were clearly articulated err... visualized ! Later, all moodboards and designs were integrated with Opinion Polls to quickly make decisions.

One question that everybody in Drupal community has on their minds is how do we prepare for Drupal 8. This is a question that is common with both client managers and development shops. We will discuss few learnings we have had over the last 8 months building with D8; and the challenges that the team had to overcome. Also, we will explain our rationale of choosing to build with D8 for client project. 

This session will be useful to a variety of audience, and some sample points that will talk about during the session.

Developers :