Business and Strategy

The ideal project is one where everyone on the team starts at the very beginning and moves through the project from start to finish. But there are plenty of times where this doesn't happen because of resource availability, increase or decrease of scope, and/or people joining or leaving the company.

The Ag Data Commons is a prototype that aims to facilitate access, dissemination and long-term stewardship for the unclassified data products of scientific research for the benefit of the broader agricultural research community as well as policy-makers, industry, and the public.

It builds on existing USDA investments including a repository of public access agricultural research articles and associated indexing system, machine-aided assignment of subject terms from an agriculture-specific thesaurus, and various domain-specific platforms that manage a fraction of the data.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein, Physicist

If you're thinking of implementing Drupal within a *.gov, you may feel lost like we did when it comes to the various numbers (800-53), acroynms (ATO), and requirements around information security.

Whether your site consists of relatively few evergreen pages or a large database of evergreen pages and serial content (e.g. news releases), you’re likely concerned about search engines directing people to your site when they need the information you offer. Performing search engine optimization (SEO) on your site can lead to higher search rankings and increased traffic, but it can be difficult to weed through SEO advice and differentiate good tactics from bad ones — and to know how to measure success.

As professionals in the digital marketing industry we know the importance that data plays in better understanding our users and their behavior. Data can be used to help make organizational decisions, drive site architecture design, and define site improvements. Many times though the hurdle of defining a project's goals, and how you go about collecting data to measure success, or failure, can feel overwhelming. Sometimes we don’t know how to properly collect the right data or, we don’t understand how to quantify a qualitative response like emotion.

Successful innovators steal most of their best ideas from someone else. Innovation isn’t about figuring out everything yourself. If every government agency copies 99% of their good ideas from some similar agency who has already demonstrated success, and then adds a single new twist on top, I’m certain government can be a bastion of innovation. Instead, most IT projects spend huge amounts of time and energy reinventing wheels and solving solved problems.

You've got a project in Drupal for your Agile client, and you've got a great team of architects and developers. You're working with enthusiastic product owners. How do you bridge the gap between client wants and needs and what the developers need to know? In this session, we'll revisit the basics of good user story and acceptance criteria writing and go through some Jira tips to help you keep your tickets focused and project on track. 

Assumptions: background with Drupal projects, project management with Jira

As the user centered design approach merges lean UX with agile development we find ourselves running to planning, scoping and management tools to capture, manage and assign the backlogs.  Tools like Jira, Trello and Asana are great at capturing the boards and managing the tickets - but is it enough?  Have we done enough strategic planning and analysis and of the features before assigning them to epic and sprint priority?  If not, what more can be done?