Last Modified on: 8/27/2017
Dallas GiveCamp: Project Manager Handbook
2017GiveCamp
Project Manager Handbook
Sept 6, 2017
Page 1
Last Modified on: 8/27/2017
Dallas GiveCamp: Project Manager Handbook
Contents
Introduction3
! The Most Important thing to remember3
General GiveCamp Info3
Suggested Timeline4
Getting Yourself Ready5
Tips on prepping for GiveCamp5
Working with the Charity6
Work directly with the Charity representative:7
Working with your Team7
Tips and Tricks for working with your team7
Working with the Design8
Tips and Tricks for working with the design8
Working with the Technology9
Tips for working with the technology9
Working the Weekend10
Manage the following during the actual weekend:10
Common challenges and how to prepare for them11
Lesson learned from past GiveCamps11
The Details12
Misc. Resources15
Appendix A16
Appendix B17
Introduction
Welcome Developers to GiveCamp 2017! GiveCamp is an extraordinary event and a great opportunity to help Charities that give so much to our community. This event takes a dedicated effort of planning and leadership from everyone. This handbook contains helpful tips and tricks to ensure we have a successful event. Thank you for your support, GiveCamp would not be possible without your help!!
! The Most Important thing to remember
If you take nothing else away from this document, remember this:
GiveCamp PM Rule #1:
GiveCamp is a REALLY SHORT weekend, the more you can move from “during the weekend” to “before the weekend” the better the weekend will go. Prioritize as you go.
All of the following advice will be specific examples of that rule in action.
General GiveCamp Info
- This is a living document check for updates at
- Email questions
- Assignment to a Charity will be determined prior to GiveCamp weekend. This will be communicated out by one of the GiveCamp leads.
- Please do not solicit the Charities for additional work outside of GiveCamp for website planning, consulting, etc.
- Key Dates:
▪9/6/2017Dev and PM Boot camp - 6PM to 7:30PM
▪10/11/2017Kickoff – 6PM to 7:30PM
▪10/20/2017Check-in 5PM to 6PM. Kickoff 6PM
▪10/22/2017End of GiveCamp - 4PM
- Where:
nThrive, 5543 Legacy Drive , Plano TX 75024
Suggested Timeline
⇒NOW – Gather requirements from your charities, keeping a close eye on the scope of the project to ensure that it is doable in a weekend. Review charities applications for requirements.
⇒T-3 weeks Friday (Sept 8th) – Short, 30 minute call with your assigned charity to discuss what they want done at a high level, no technical discussions required- think business requirements. PM, BA, & charity are required.
⇒Wednesday (Oct 11th) – Kickoff, meet your team, review the overall scope of the project and bring your list of technical skills with level of expertise. All team members and charity are required to meet.
⇒T-2 weeks Friday (Oct 6th) – 30 minute call to decide on technology and review scope of work. Get finalization on technology choice and agreement that the scope is attainable. Lead developer, UX, BA, and tech Jedi are required. NOW – If you charity needs hosting/database or other resources request it (instructions below)
⇒T-1 week Friday (Oct 13th) – 60 minute call to review scope, technology, and ask for individual ownership of tasks. PM should set up tracking & communication tools, if applicable. Lead Dev should set up environments and DBs, if applicable. Encourage them to brush up on any skills that they might need during the event weekend. All team members required.
⇒T-1 days (Thursday, Oct 19th) – Touch base with the team and ensure everybody is ready for Friday night. Communicate any last-minute updates from the charity.
⇒Friday Night (Oct 20th) – Start of GiveCamp
⇒Sunday (Oct 22nd)
– 12AM Code Complete
– 2PM Email presentation. This is a team effort that the PM will present.
– 1PM App Presentation
Getting Yourself Ready
The first step to starting a successful GiveCamp weekend is getting yourself prepared. It is a valuable service you are providing, and it falls on you to make sure all the donated time and resources are used in the most efficient way possible, in the limited time you have access to them.
It is hard work, but you can do it.
Start by getting yourself prepared. The charities have already done a lot of work getting their submissions ready. The Givecamp staff has spent a lot of time and effort refining the tools and resources we have to make you successful.
Spend time reviewing the documents and assets you already have BEFORE you reach out to the client. Nothing will undermine your reputation with the charity faster than asking a question they have already answered one or two times on their initial application or long form. If you have questions regarding the application, please reach out to the GiveCamp staff.
! STOP: Before reading any further, get your Charities Long Form Application out and review it.
As you read, pay careful attention to what they are trying to accomplish, and what they are asking for. This will form the basis for all the rest of your planning. Making sure you can deliver exactly what the charity needs so they can do more for the community.
Tips on prepping for GiveCamp
●Start planning 4 weeks prior to event. Key is to plan in advance, the pace is fast.
●Review your Charities long form, and be familiar with their mission, and what they are specifically expecting to get at the end of GiveCamp.
●Get to know the Charity you are helping out beforehand, understand their work and message.
●Majority of the work we do is building a website or updating a website for charities. Research online if technology projects and/or website builds are new for you.
●Get all tasks laid out, as much as you can get set up do before hand- If you don’t you could waste a day on it. That is 50% of the GiveCamp time. Do it beforehand.
●Pre-discuss design of website with the UX. Communicate with rest of team prior to weekend on what the template may look like. This will give developers a starting point while the design is being finished up.
●Focus on what you can get done in 12 hours x 5 people.Friday will be a lot of prep, leaving all day Saturday, and half of Sunday to complete.
●Have all graphics available, make sure developers are aware where that information is. Your options from worst to best:
●Thumbdrive, Good to have as a fall back, but doesn’t scale, and will be hard to locate in the future.
●Dropbox, Box, Google Drive or OneDrive, Good for sharing, and long term stability, but lacks versioning and integration with normal developer tools.
●Source Control, TFSOnline, Github, Codeplex, Private TFS. The best idea, the images and source code are managed together. A larger discussion of Source control options is covered later in this document.
●During the weekend, communicate what problems are- your team can help you resolve. Get to know your team so tasks are appropriately assigned. If your team doesn’t know the answers reach out to the GiveCamp organizers, we are all in this together and we all want every project to succeed.
●If you use any tools that GiveCamp provides, like hosting through Everleap, get this set up before. Source control, etc. Do a dry run of as much stuff as possible beforehand. If you are using database, get the database, if you are using a third party product like WordPress make sure you have all of the install media and nay plug-ins or patches, etc.
●If you are not technical and need help, reach out to one of your team members to fill that role. Someone will need to connect to databases, server and do test deployments. Whoever does it, make sure everything is tested well before the start of the weekend.
●Communication – make sure people know what you need them to work on prior and get a status before the event.
●Communication with the team at least once a week.
●Communicate updates to charity rep. Ensure they know when to be where for the event.
●Start meeting about a month before. As soon as you get the team assignments and have the charity intros, start meeting.
Working with the Charity
You want a chance to be a hero in real life.
Well this is it.
You are about to achieve something your charity can only dream of. They may make amazing things happen in your community, and do things with their life that you would never be able to make the sacrifice to do. You are going to be performing a potentially course altering project that will impact the trajectory of their story from this point forward. That is awesome.
To work with them effectively there are two things you will need to focus on.
- The Relationship. Don’t sell this short. Make sure you get to know them and their mission. They are passionate about it, and you should make sure you develop some real passion about it as well. Someone you know may come to depend upon their services in the near future. Take time with them and make sure you understand what they need and want.
- The Scope. This is always the biggest challenge. Keeping the scope manageable, and communicating that clearly. They won’t know what is possible, and what they see as valuable often will not have a direct correlation to what is hard or easy. They may get a lot of value out of a simple change, and may only get a small bump from something that is very hard to do. But remember this: Disappointment isn’t possible without first having incorrect expectations. Whatever scope you commit to delivering, make sure your charity has correct expectations all the way along. Don’t over commit, we only have 1 weekend.
Work directly with the Charity representative:
●Meet with Charity rep prior to GiveCamp: gather requirements and have a clear understanding of the plan prior to GiveCamp weekend. Define as much website content as possible.
●Break all of the things they have asked for into buckets, at some point you may need to start trimming the scope. Know what you can cut. And when you are planning to do the work, make sure you are not spending hours on an “optional” item when a “must have” is being neglected:
●Must have
●Really Want
●Nice to have
●Optional if easy
●Know when and how long they will be onsite during the weekend.
●Know how to get a hold of them or someone on their team during the weekend in case you have an urgent need for information or clarification.
●Be the conduit between the charity and developers, make the lines open where developers can have direct contact if needed.
●If possible, meet before GiveCamp and review the design with the developers
●Remind the Charity rep to be available that weekend either onsite, email, phone, IM. This will also provide the Charity training to use the tool. Additionally, scope can change, there is need for ad hoc mtg.
Working with your Team
Your team is taking away a full weekend from their friends and family to donate time to complete strangers.
That is awesome. Make sure you remind them of that fact.
SAFETY FIRST: Keep in mind that team members come from all over the DFW area. Consider drive times when staying late & meeting early. We want to be productive, but volunteer safety is important.
What they will need most of all is for you to fill two roles.
- Direction: Assign and Manage tasks: The first role is to manage the work and keep track of tasks. Make sure everyone is busy, has tasks and is adding value. The timeline for GiveCamp is very compressed, and if you are pulling late nights energy can wane and emotions flare up. An engaged developer that can stay heads down doing what they do best is a happy developer. Keeping tasks balanced and everyone engaged is almost like running an agile project with 3 hour sprints.
- Air Cover: Clear up questions and clear roadblocks. Invariably there will be questions, debates, and issues with technology. As the PM, you need to take those on and handle them, or risk the entire team burning time they don’t have to spare. If you have been diligent about getting all the development and deployment tools tested before the weekend, then this should be minimized.
Tips and Tricks for working with your team
●Test all the tools before the weekend
●Confirm role expectations for each member prior to the weekend, to ensure they understand and can complete their responsibilities.
●Meet with your team or have conference calls before the weekend, so they can understand the scope and design of what they are doing.
●If they have concerns about the scope, or design, get those resolved before the weekend.
●Understand each team member’s experience and how it can be best utilized during GiveCamp
●Get people to commit to what hours they will or won’t be there. This is a weekend where someone will have tickets to something, or a kid’s soccer game that they cannot miss. Figure that out before the weekend, and let the staff know if you will be “down a man” for the weekend and we can assign more resources.
●Have the UX design finalized well before the weekend, and make sure you have access to all the design resources and image files.
●This project is really too short to use most online tools for tracking progress, and everyone is in the same room. Some teams have had success using a tool like AgileZen, but you can also just use white boards or easel pads to put critical information where everyone in the room can see it. Feel free to grab a piece of large paper, write the tasks and name assigned to them on it, and hang it on the wall. Mark through it when done. The important thing is that “what hast to be done” and “who is doing this” needs to be crystal clear.
●Have frequent breaks for food and status. GiveCamp does a good job of feeding developers, force them to take small breaks for food. Have progress checks right before or after a meal break.
●Use your team’s expertise. They are experts, if you have a problem, ask them what they think. If there is a clear consensus on the path forward, go with that. If they are divided, then you make a call and press on. If you need more data or opinions, give them something to work on and track down the onsite staff.
Working with the Design
Many of your projects will be something like this:
“We need an updated website that works on mobile and is easier to update”
There is a lot of charities and small businesses that are stuck in a model where they have a service provider that has the login to their site, and in order to get changes to the site they have to send the changes to them, and wait for them to login and make the changes.
It is pretty common, and the most common, widely accepted answer is to move them to something like WordPress and put a custom theme on the site. This in most years is the bread and butter type project for GiveCamp.
To make this effective, make sure you have a UX resource on your team, and make sure they work with the charity to understand their brand, colors, current site content and future content they are planning to add.
The UX pro should be able to handle all the details, designing the navigation structure, picking an appropriate starter theme, and identifying the changes to make for that theme to be “on brand” for your charity.
Often they will also create a new or refreshed logo for the charity.
Tips and Tricks for working with the design
●Make sure you validate that wordpress will work. Note: issues can arise when too many admins are accessing the admin page at the same time
●If the Charity uses joomla, drupal, phpnuke, DNN, sitefinity or other CMS and they are happy with it, make sure the UX Designer knows that.
●Get copies of all the image assets.
●Make sure to get the colors documented, preferably as hex codes for the CSS.
●Make sure if a theme is used, you have the entire zip file.
●If the UX Designer will not be on site for the weekend, make sure you know how to get a hold of them. There always seems to be one more image slice, or a slightly different version that is needed at the last minute.
Working with the Technology
Obviously the success or failure of your weekend will depend largely on you and your team’s ability to get the technology the charity needs, acquired, deployed, configured, and populated with correct content. Many GiveCamp project involve some level of data migration or content remastering. Rarely do they come to GiveCamp with NO website or email.
There are two main areas to focus on here:
- The current site: You need to know how to get to everything your team will need. That is at a bare minimum the location of the following, DNS Registrar, DNS Hosting, DNS domain proxy (if used), Website, FTP, Database, CMS admin (if they have one), CRM admin (if they have one), Email, social media accounts. Know where they are hosts, the urls to the admin panels, usernames and either get the passwords, or make sure you have someone on call that can make the changes you will need. But have a lists of all the locations and passwords is preferred.
- The New site: There are some great free assets and donations that are being made available for the charities. I mean who could not use lifetime free webhosting. That is pretty sweet. So make sure that is all set up before the weekend.
If they are moving to a new CMS, it may be faster to just copy and paste, or copy and then edit and then paste the “remastered” content into the new system.