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by Adam Edgerton, Director of Project Management
First off, yes, I realize it's "sound bite", but given the context, "byte" sounds more applicable. The Toads have been at Drupalcon Portland this week in force! With a sponsor booth to manage and two different parties to organize, we've been busy, but I've managed to squeeze a few sessions in as well. Here are some top quotes and takeaways along the way: Read More…
by Adam Edgerton, Director of Project Management
Project management. Is it a dark art? Is it science? Probably some combination of both. Across the web/app/software development industry, consensus seems to be that finding project managers is easy, but finding great project managers is hard to impossible. At Metal Toad (and likely many similar organizations), a project manager needs a much broader skill set than the ability to create Gannt charts, track budgets, and manage scope. Metal Toad project managers are truly directors of their projects, owning them in their entirety from inception to go-live and beyond. The vast responsibilities of our PMs (see below) make it difficult to find and retain the right talent. Read More…
by Adam Edgerton, Director of Project Management
I recently attended BADCamp where I had the opportunity to talk shop with project managers from a number of different agencies. I had some insightful conversations and a few really good takeaways that will help me improve project management at Metal Toad. But for the most part, the go-to conversation seems to be about project management tools. Do you use Basecamp? How about Trello? Jira? MS Project? Any of the other five hundred options out there? The tools conversation seems to come up over and over again because it's easy; it doesn't force the participants to get at the meat of project management. Read More…
by Adam Edgerton, Director of Project Management
I recently came across Rahul Singh's Non-Programming Skills Every Programmer Should Have Thanks to Aaron Amstutz. The post outlines six important areas of personal development for programmers: Read More…
by Adam Edgerton, Director of Project Management
We're in the middle of interviews for our open project manager position and we've been talking to a lot of great candidates, all with diverse project process backgrounds at various companies. Not to toot our own horn too much, but one thing that I've realized as a result is just how great our project life cycle model is! We've made great strides in the last several years, and at this point we have it dialed-in for the type of projects that come through our door. Without further ado, in the spirit of open-sourcing not only our software contributions but also our processes, here's what we do and why it works: Read More…
by Adam Edgerton, Director of Project Management
The life of a project manager is one of disruptions. As I sit here trying to write this blog post, I've been interrupted by questions from two developers, a relatively small tidal wave of email (it can get much worse), a completed deploy to check in on, a phone call from a client, and several tickets ready for QA. But that's okay. Good, even! That's what we're here for; PMs are the interrupt driven team member on projects and help keep developers focused and efficient, clients in the know, and projects moving forward at maximum warp speed. It just means that most days my timesheet reads like a short novel of quarter hour increments! Read More…
by Adam Edgerton, Director of Project Management
At Metal Toad we're big fans of responsive design, but a common snag in the responsive planning process comes when choosing what device widths to design to. Just yesterday we had a big internal debate over what the best widths to design to are for 3 layout sites, 4 layout sites, etc. I'll get to our conclusions below, but another important distinction to call out is that for each layout there are two things to consider: what the pixel width range for a specific layout should be, and what pixel width the designer should create the PSDs at. Read More…
by Adam Edgerton, Director of Project Management
The recent blog post, "A MOET and POET Curve-Fitting Approach to Project Management & Meeting Time Estimation" details my investigation into historical data to see what sorts of projects tended to have increased project management and meeting time. Our guess was that project timeline relative to project scope could heavily influence the overhead in terms of meetings and PM required. I was able to verify the hypothesis with our own project data and came up with two new theories that need some outside validation before I'd consider them laws by any stretch of the imagination, MOET and POET. Read More…
by Adam Edgerton, Director of Project Management
Find the curves to estimate meeting and project management time (almost) perfectly for your projects! We call it Meeting Overhead Efficiency Theory and Project Overhead Efficiency Theory, or MOET and POET for all of you acronym lovers. Read More…
by Adam Edgerton, Director of Project Management
In case you missed the news, we've officially moved to our new office at 3rd and Salmon! We're back up and running after an overnight move, but there is still plenty of unpacking to complete. We're already enjoying having a great deal more space to work with than at the previous office. Next up will be a build-out of the space to make it more functional and fun! We'll eventually have an entry area complete with foosball table, multiple conference rooms, a kitchen, "caves" to go hide in away from the crowd to focus and get work done, multiple offices, and of course the developer pit. Here's a first-look at the new space, and we'll be sure to do a before-and-after once we have it tidied up and built out. Read More…