NTC Project Management for OS CMS Follow-up

By Heather Gardner..., April 17, 2010

This year was my first time being on a panel for the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference hosted by NTEN. The well-attended session that I took part in,"Making it Real: Getting Project Management Right for Content Management Web Projects", was put together by fellow Idealware blogger Steve Backman and was not only a lot of fun, but seemed to be useful for a lot of different types of folks. I have to admit to being sort of a project management aficionado and was very excited to participate. Mimi Kantor also of Database Designs and Ted Fickes from The Wilderness Society provided a wealth of experience and wisdom to the panel as well.

In preparing for the session we soon realized that the topic was both wide and deep and needed to be narrowed down. Naturally there were areas in which we wished we could have spent more time and some of the resources we wanted to include just didn't fit. Also, due to a SlideShare issue our list of resource links didn't make it into the final slides so I thought I would post some of the more useful items here.

You can see the session slides (sans links below) on SlideShare, which is good, because our projector wouldn't work and we didn't get to show them live.

One of the big differences for managing a project for a new site or redesign in an open source CMS is the flexibility of process steps. Unlike a hand-built HTML site or even an all in one proprietary system, organizations now have a whole array of alternate paths to site completion - as long as the strategic planning gets done first to guide the way. There are so many options and considerations that can determine the best project workflow for a particular site that this could probably be a session in and of itself.

And we came up with some great resources if you are just getting into project management or are new to building a site on an Open Source database driven CMS. Is there project manager equivalent to the accidental techie role in nonprofits? The answer seems to be a resounding YES!

Project management info
The Web Style guide is a great site for both newbies and old pros with a good grounding in the basics and some really interesting insights into the process of building your web site. Also some discussion on the Complexity of Managing a CMS from Boxes and Arrows.

Post Launch
One of the items that didn't fit but I think is still worth offering here is a sample post-launch planning document I use with clients to aid for keeping their web site fresh, with some smart improvements from Steve. We think its a good idea to plan ahead as part of the site launch process to make sure all that work doesn't suffer from neglect once the excitement about the site has worn off.

Enough with the theory, just tell me about the tools

Reviews
Right here on Idealware are some fantastic resources on project management tools including a look at of some of the most common project management tools.
From Social Signal there is a good review of manymoon and the earlier but still good examination of basecamp workflows.

And the missing links - Mimi tracked down and posted all these in the version of the slides that SlideShare refused to upload - so here they are:

Communications Tools