Drupal.org Redesign: Not Your Typical Project Managment Situation

Monday, October 18, 2010 was a historic day for Drupal when the updated code and Bluecheese theme were launched on Drupal.org. The Redesign project began a couple years ago, and its success always depended on the dedication of active volunteers.

I got involved with the redesign when I volunteered to "help with QA" in June 2009. I must have shown some initiative or something, because by September 2009 I was assisting Kieran Lal with project management duties, and Chris Strahl pitched in to help us in early 2010.

My sincere appreciation goes out to everyone who made this launch happen, particularly the infrastructure team, our awesome contract team, the Bluecheese contributors, and my fellow project managers, Kieran and Chris.

Not Your Typical Project

What does it mean to be a project manager on a major volunteer-driven site redesign?

First of all, this was not your typical project, or project management gig. When there's no pay, no budget, no schedule, it means very little can be controlled but everything still has to get done!

I look back at the project and think of it terms of phases. In Phase 1, we were relying entirely on volunteer implementers, infrastructure folks and others. Those were difficult times. There were lows. We were doing the best we could to move things forward but without the technical leadership we needed ("Please, just tell me how this should be done!").

In Phase 2, the Drupal Association decided to fund a significant amount of money to clear the blockers and get the redesigned site live. Not long after this, I joined GVS (June 2010), and one of our company benefits is that time spent on normal work tasks creates 20% paid time to work on Drupal community tasks and/or training. At one point, my "available community time" was negative 107 hours. Thankfully, my awesome teammates allowed this.

Sprinting at DrupalCon Copenhagen

Not Your Typical Project Management Duties

Some of the tasks performed to support the project managers and the project itself:

• General Cat Herding: Liase with community members to encourage participation, get feedback, point people to issues, hang out in IRC a lot, etc
• Prioritizing: Triage the issue queues (Yes, plural. Redesign tasks are filed in the appropriate project issue queue, but tagged 'drupal.org redesign' to pull issues together from multiple queues), cut features from Minimum Viable Product
• Content Coordination: Evaluating the content needs of the redesign, identifying new content to be written, content editing, persuading the team that we needed to hire a copywriter for the Drupal Features sections, committing copy updates to the drupalorg module, pushing the Community Spotlights, and liaising with the Documentation team.
• Communication and documentation: Co-writing and editing community communication, such as the front page posts on Drupal.org and our section of groups.drupal.org, communication to the volunteers, creating how-to's, a plethora of Google Docs spreadsheets, and lots and lots of Skype meetings.
• Raising Awareness: Tweeting, doing sessions/talks/BOFs at meetups/camps/DrupalCons; interviews, including Lullabot's Drupal Voices at DrupalCon San Francisco and Drupal Radar at DrupalCon Copenhagen.
• Design: Design/UI discussions and decisions for sections without prototypes
• Hiring: Co-writing job descriptions, interviewing candidates for the DA-funded Redesign contracts

There were highs and there were lows. There were days I avoided the computer altogether. The Redesign has gotten it's share of criticism over how things were implemented, the way they look and more, but we've seen some wonderful praise as well. There have also incredible opportunities, like being approached multiple times to talk about the redesign, and working with great folks like Derek Wright and Neil Drumm (to name just a few!)

GVS team involvement

Growing Venture Solutions was happy to help improve Drupal's home. GVS was one of the original section sponsors, taking responsibility for the Getting Involved section.

Everyone on the GVS team was completely supportive of our contributions to the Drupal.org redesign. Carl Wiedemann and myself were the most involved, but Greg, Ben and Ezra helped by answering a lot of my "What do you think of this?" questions.

Once the Redesign team moved away from having sponsored sections, Carl stepped in and contributed a lot of time to polishing the Bluecheese theme. Many of these issues dealt with accessibility and cross-browser compatibility. The work to improve Bluecheese continues.

The Get Started page on drupal.org is a great example of a new page that needed a lot of copy and code work!

Next steps for GVS and the Redesign project

Drupal.org content is a vast, moving target, and could use more volunteers for content strategy and planning! There's still some areas that need some deep design thinking and strategic planning and lots of lovely volunteers, namely the Case studies, the About pages (any pages that aren't "how-to" documentation, really) and the Community Spotlights.

Content, themers and developers can also help with open issues tagged with 'drupal.org redesign'.

Another big redesign tasks will be to convert groups.drupal.org to the new Bluecheese theme. More on that soon.