A Nonprofit Tech Project Manager Community of Practice!

Well, our first live event – Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects – was at the end of last week, and it went great. Truthfully, it was pretty amazing to get together a whole group of people – 60 of them – who were interested in nonprofit project management. I’m not the only one!

It was a discussion-based event, and the level of discussion was phenomenal. There were a ton of very experienced folks in the room, and almost everyone was, well, managerial – willing to both speak up and to listen to others.

There was far too much good stuff to summarize, but here are some of the most interesting takeaways for me:

• There was a lot of discussion about both the benefits of an iterative approach that prioritizes a quick, raw, early launch (we were calling it a “sushi” launch), and the benefits of careful scoping. And then the inevitable tension between those two approaches. As this is something I’m struggling with myself, I got some interesting pointers about how to balance the approaches.

• We had a great session on mapping collaboration needs to collaboration software tools, where we shared thoughts on everything from intranets to wikis to group chat to Second Life. It was a really useful framework for thought – and hopefully there will be an article forthcoming from us based on the session.

• We did a “software bazaar” – practitioners demoed software for each other, and the participants were free to wander to whatever demos they wanted – and there was a lot of interest for the different packages across the board. I was surprised at the interest in even what I had been considering basic tools – stuff like MS Project and Basecamp – which was a good reminder for me of how difficult it can be for individual nonprofit folks to know what others are using and consider whether it’s right for them.

• I saw a quick demo of FreeMind – a free, open source clone of MindMap – which is pretty nifty for diagramming. I had heard of these tools, but I hadn’t actually tried them out. Seems pretty useful.
  

If you’re interested in seeing more – including all the notes from all the sessions – check out the event wiki

And stay tuned for more events – Project Management and otherwise. This format was a great success that we look forward to bringing to other cities and topics!