You Shall Not Pass: Managing Expectations and Boundaries with Clients
*Excerpt
Open Source is great fun, even in the area of professional services. But sometimes, you want to be able to pay the bills with your awesomeness too. One of the areas of difficulty is setting boundaries with clients, even though you really just want to write amazing stuff.
Description
We all struggle to maintain the scope of projects, but it’s sometimes difficult to tell a client “no”. After all, they’re the ones paying you, and they want you to deliver exactly what is in their head. It’s not simple to manage their expectations, but not doing it can sink a project.
This session is going to go into the motivations behind clients pushing on companies to deliver more. It’s also going to talk about why and how you should push back in order to ultimately create a better experience for everyone on the project. So you can get back to coding and not have the sinking feeling of dread when you open your email.
We’re focusing on CMS projects as examples, but the lessons are applicable across software development projects.
Tags
project management, expectation management, tough love
Speaking experience
Speakers
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- Website: http://msamye.com/
- Twitter: msamye
- Identi.ca: msamye
- Favorites: View Amye 's favorites
Biography
I am:
- a project manager based out of Portland
I like:
- good websites and a good fight about what makes them good
- opinions, standards, processes, and conversations about when they break
- useful things that can be beautiful, but maybe not intrinsically beautiful
- a good, well-thought out user experience
- a good glass of wine
Sessions
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- Title: You Shall Not Pass: Managing Expectations and Boundaries with Clients
- Track: Business
- Room: Burnside
- Time: 3:45 – 4:30pm
-
Excerpt:
Open Source is great fun, even in the area of professional services. But sometimes, you want to be able to pay the bills with your awesomeness too. One of the areas of difficulty is setting boundaries with clients, even though you really just want to write amazing stuff.
- Speakers: Amye Scavarda, Chris Strahl
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- Title: Functional Requirements: Thinking Like A Pirate
- Track: Business
- Room: Broadway
- Time: 10:00 – 11:45am
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Excerpt:
Creating functional requirements as a part of the planning process is like creating a treasure map. You want to get compensated for the value your cool built-with-open-source-thing is providing to your clients. Your clients want it to work better than what they originally had in mind. If you do the work upfront, you’ll know when you’ve hit the X marks the spot.
- Speakers: Amye Scavarda, Bill Fitzgerald
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Chris Strahl
Acquia- Website: http://acquia.com/
- Blog: http://lookingglass.drupalgardens.com/
- Twitter: chrisstrahl
Biography
I am a Project Manager at Acquia, a commercial open source company working with Drupal. Most of my clients are large corporations or public-sector defense. Acquia hosts and supports Drupal sites, and also maintains a network of partners to develop and build large-scale websites.
I’m also active in the Drupal community and was one of the project managers for the Drupal.org redesign. I also assisted in the migration of all of the repositories on drupal.org moving from CVS to Git.
Sessions
-
- Title: You Shall Not Pass: Managing Expectations and Boundaries with Clients
- Track: Business
- Room: Burnside
- Time: 3:45 – 4:30pm
-
Excerpt:
Open Source is great fun, even in the area of professional services. But sometimes, you want to be able to pay the bills with your awesomeness too. One of the areas of difficulty is setting boundaries with clients, even though you really just want to write amazing stuff.
- Speakers: Amye Scavarda, Chris Strahl