So Happy Together: How to Work With Your Vendor to Get a Product You'll Love

Speaker(s): hrodrig

In government, client/vendor relationships are often fraught with many challenges from the onset: RFPs are written before site needs can truly be discovered and architected, web committees are formed with so many opinionated stakeholders that decision-making barely inches along, and each department wants their content to be treated differently than all other site content with custom solutions built to support idiosyncratic workflows. As both a government contractor, and previously as an in-house developer for higher ed, I've seen projects suffer all too often from the same avoidable mistakes. At this session, I will impart some strategies I've learned along the way to promote project success and minimize failure, such as how to:

  • craft an RFP that communicates high level requirements while maintaining flexibility
  • choose the right people for the job: roles and responsibilities for your internal web team
  • empower a product owner, aka The Enforcer
  • communicate ideas and solutions with your vendor (sounds easy, but I can almost guarantee you will ask for something that is not what you'll get!)
  • plan for sustainability, including when to say no to custom solutions
  • embrace agile development practices to minimize risk, get visibility into project progress, and ensure that the product you wind up stuck with is one that you'll love.

This session recently debuted at Stanford Drupal Camp 2016. 

Audience
Experience Level
Beginner
Schedule Info
Conference Year
2016
Date / Time
Status
Accepted
Session Track
Community and Being Human