DrupalCon Amsterdam – The Give Back

DrupalCon Austin 2014 is in full swing as of tomorrow,  my attendance is restricted to watching live feeds of the keynotes and the session recordings on Drupal Association’s Youtube channel … having not made it to the North American Con (again!)… thought I’d put the little down time between contracts to prepare for DrupalCon Amsterdam, on what I propose to share in two sessions freshly submitted.

Both in the business track;  one more a workshop than a traditional session… am quite excited at the prospect of having one if not both selected (fingers crossed). The first one I have proposed is a more indepth version of my ‘Practical Agile Product Development’ session recently delivered at Drupal

Camp Yorkshire. Its 16 years of experience of delivering products, projects and transformation programs using various flavours of Agile, from James Martin’s RAD (Rapid Application Development) for getting products out of the door in their minimum viable form to giving the chaos structure using Dynamic systems development method (DSDM) to falling in love with the simplicity of SCRUM and then the combination of SCRUM and KANBAN: SCRUMBAN. From the beginning to date the challenge remains selecting which flavour of Agile is best suited for the engagement… and more challenging still occasions when the herd is convinced on not using Agile at all and its my job to swing the Jury in the opposite direction, this happens more so on the non-tech elements of a transformation program than the tech aspects of course.

The second session I have proposed is about getting agencies of all sizes in the community better tooled up to face off  Tier 1 & 2 consultancies and systems integrators who are increasingly and rapidly developing their Drupal capabilities given the size and scale of the opportunities in the Enterprise space. What started of as a niche platform has gone mainstream and with it has brought the big full service firms in to Drupalverse, which folks is a great thing for all involved in Drupal, FOSS and Enterprise!

Then there is the wider shift of agencies moving in to digital consulting since many of the Tier 1’s have historically lacked the depth agencies have built up over the years in the digital realm. So my second proposed session ‘Understanding your prospects, clients, stakeholders (Jury) and end users‘ is an in depth look at three models, my current favorites; Empathy maps to better understand the actors in your ecosystem, HotHousing  an exploration framework that mixes creative design thinking options with agile delivery outcomes, and Jobs-To-Be-Done framework (JTBD) a way to understand customer’s needs, motivations and behaviours. All three together are a powerful toolkit for any engagement be it tactics to approach a new prospect, running productive workshops with clients or ascertaining the ‘true’ needs of end users and facilitating them to articulate them and then co-designing options for fulfilling them.

Fingerscrossed I’ll get to share my knowledge and experiences on both Agile and Digital Consulting, however if there could be only one… I’d jump on the opportunity to tool up the community to better understand and engage with their prospects, clients, stakeholders (Jury) and end users.

For the curious this post is called Give back  for it is exactly that, back in 2012 in Munich I shared the challenges I was facing bringing peripheral communities into the fold with the global community, who in turn rallied to my aid and between Munich 2012 and Austin 2014 me and a few local hosts have kicked off four 1st ever Camps in 4 cities in two countries and been an inspiration for another two. Sharing what many of my peers in the consulting space prefer to keep to themselves as their magic models, I would like to believe sharing them with the community is my own personal give back, a huge thank you of sorts. Gondor returning the favour to Rohan if that’s your thing… or Lannisters paying a debt if you are so inclined!