Project Management

BADCamp 2020 gave me a virtual stage to share stories and insights from my life as an activist, along with insights I think could benefit anyone working in a team. I dedicated years of my life to causes that matter to me. When I transitioned into working for a Drupal web development agency as a project manager, I thought I would be starting from scratch. I was wrong. 

Many people are newly working remotely during the pandemic and have had to drastically change how they work in the past several months. It has been stressful, but there are some silver linings in our current situation.

For instance, three years ago I made the transition to remote project management because I was drowning in a daily commute. It really changed my life to get nearly two hours a day back. Also, the flexibility was a real bonus for me, so I could walk my dog Max or take a yoga class.

For the past year at Kalamuna, we have, slowly but surely, been working on refreshing our brand. Over much discussion, internal and external collaboration with branding agency C42D, and iteration, we ended up with a guide that laid the groundwork for our new brand strategy and visual identity system. This guide, however useful, was quite limited as a PDF. While PDFs are sufficient for viewing elements in practice, we require greater control over the properties of elements to easily duplicate and modify them across different projects and use cases.

Working from home (aka telecommuting) can be great for productivity and employee happiness. But not everyone is used to it – or prepared to do it (and many have been forced to recently because of COVID-19). At Kalamuna, we work on a distributed team, which means that most of us already work from home – and some of us are also used to setting up temporary workstations while travelling. It’s not always easy (or ideal), but a few small adjustments can make a big difference. Here are some of our team’s top tips for working effectively from the homefront.

Let’s take a trip back to 1996. Bill Clinton was elected to his second term as president, and the Nintendo 64 was released in North America. People called the internet the World Wide Web and logged into AOL to check their email while tying up their phone line. There was not much else to do online, as Google, Twitter, and Facebook were not around yet (thanks Slate and Wikipedia for the time capsule info).

As more and more companies liberate themselves from finding talent in a single geographical  location, the traditional office party could become a thing of the past. While I have had my fair share of awkward moments at office parties, they can also be critical components of building and maintaining company culture. 

When is it time to panic?

“God help us, we're in the hands of engineers.” – Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park

As a project manager, I know that people are going to be happiest and get the most work done when they are using systems that they are comfortable and familiar with. Thanks to a syncing technology, called Unito, our teams are able to enhance collaboration, gain efficiencies, and stay aligned.

Last month I went through Scrum Master training to learn how to better whip projects into shape, and I want to share a few takeaways from the two-day training. They say that Scrum is an easy process methodology to understand, but hard to master. I would agree with this wholeheartedly. One of the benefits of becoming a certified Scrum Master is that you get two days of in depth training on the basics, and the basics are where it’s at.

Building a JIRA dashboard to encompass all projects and team members can be challenging in an agency. We have multiple projects of differing scope and scale running at the same time using various agile methodologies. The dashboard needs to give team members and stakeholders an overall sense of the work we’re doing, as well as motivation to act to move the project forward. Check out these six steps you can take (we did!) to supercharge your JIRA dashboard and make it more useful for everyone.