Proposed Sessions for Drupalcon San Francisco

Presently there are nine of us from ImageX Media who are coming to Drupalcon San Francisco 2010 and we’re all quite excited for the conference to arrive. Session voting started recently and here are the ones we’ve prepared. We’re looking forward to sharing some of what we’ve been learning so we’d definitely appreciate your vote if any of these sessions hit a chord with you:

Best Practices For Managing a Drupal Firm

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Moderator: Jennifer Hols
Panel Presenters: Glenn Hilton Along with Dave Terry (Mediacurrent), Jeff Walpole (Phase2), Jon Clark, Eric Gunderson (Development Seed), Ben Finklea (Volacci), Liza Kindred (Lullabot)

Are you currently a sole practitioner providing Drupal services and would one day like to run your own firm? Are you a partner at an existing multi-developer firm looking for fresh ideas and suggestions? Are you interested in networking with other owners, who have a like-minded interest in building a practice around Drupal?

In this session, we will look beyond the technology side of Drupal and dig into the business end of what it takes to run a successful Drupal agency. We’ll touch on critical subject matter topics in areas like sales, recruiting, accounting, human resources, and how to effectively market your services.

We’ll address questions like:

• How much operating capital will I need and where do I get it in this economy?
• Does a partial or all telecommute arrangement work? What are the best practices?
• How do I find (and keep) customers without going through competitive bidding?
• Where and how do I recruit good people?
• What are the best practices for contracting for work?
• How can I find out what I should charge for my services?
• How do I effectively balance community and billable time?
• Should I combine forces with other firms and how can I pick good partners?

We will explore answers to questions like this and take questions from you for our expert panel of owner/operators that are in the Drupal trenches. They will share their own firm’s experiences and give an insider’s view of how they handle common challenges. There will be a moderator to facilitate the discussion and keep things moving along in an orderly manner.

Beyond Budget and Scope: Managing Client Expectations and Delivering Value

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Presenter: Vanessa Turke

Many projects begin with by ambiguous needs, unclear priorities, mind-changing customers, and of course, a tight deadline. There are tools to monitor budget and schedule, but failure to manage client expectations often results in frustrating miscommunications and serious consequences for projects and business relationships. Come away with a some ideas for modifying your current process to involve clients in a way that encourages healthy collaboration and lets your team work in a productive manner.

Points covered:

• Setting the stage for realistic expectations
• Engaging clients and understanding their organizational culture
• Information gathering: capturing needs and seeking understanding
• Fostering clearer understandings of risks and limitations
• Defining quality, deliverables and completion criteria
• Insights and practical techniques for optimal communications
• Addressing communication gaps in professional encounters
• Defining responsibilities and managing conflict
• Managing team/stakeholders resources
• Managing scope creep and special requests
• Handling overuns and slippage (and bearing bad news)
• Project completion and signoff

Drupal Specifics:

• How better to communicate what we know to our clients
• Best practices for including clients in the planning process
• Clearly defining deliverables and completion criteria

Creating & Managing a Common Platform for your Drupal Shop

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Presenters: Rick Vugteveen

The scenario: You are part of a development team that is busy building and maintaining dozens of Drupal sites. Each one is unique, with different features and module choices depending on the development team and launch date. How do you keep ongoing maintenance and management of these sites sane? How do you enable greater collaboration in a team environment?

One of the best solutions to this problem is to develop a base platform for your Drupal practice. This platform (aka. a Drupal distribution) will allow you to standardize module selections, reduce repetition, increase quality control and ease the burden of keeping multiple sites current with bug and security releases. This session is all about creating and maintaining a common Drupal distribution for your shop, with a focus on best practices and “from the trenches” advice.

Topics to be covered include:

• Utilizing public distributions such as Acquia Drupal as the base of your company’s system (pros/cons).
• What modules and themes should be part of your distribution.
• Metrics to guide your module sections.
• Centralized testing and quality control.
• What should be in your install profile. Where the Features module fits in.
• How specific or general to make your distribution (where to draw the line).
• Keeping a coherent architecture.
• Version control strategies.
• Release processes, changelogs & issue tracking

You should walk away from this session with a better high-level understanding of the benefits and potential pitfalls of maintaining your own Drupal platform. This session will not delve into the specifics of install profiles, the features module or version control systems (there will be plenty of other sessions that will go in-depth on each individual topic).

Optimizing Your Design and Creative Process to Deliver Stellar Results

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Presenters: Alex Ventpap , Glenn Hilton

In this session Lead Designer Alex Ventpap and Creative Director Glenn Hilton will share insights from the ImageX Media design process. With over 100 successful Drupal site launches under their belts they will reveal their approach to working with clients to create a successful site design.

Some of the topics to be covered:

• How to build trust with a client
• Uncovering a client’s vision for their website
• How to educate a client on design direction and process.
• How to manage the budget and overages
• The importance of design documentation, briefs and approvals – What’s needed, what’s not.
• How to manage difficult clients.
• Tools, resources and procedures to improve design performance and results.

Whether you need to build a large portal, social network or a smaller website, this session will give you fresh input on improving your design results.