DrupalCon unites experts from around the globe who create ambitious digital experiences. Attendees go to network, learn, and be inspired. This year, the conference took place in Nashville, TN, on April 9-13 at Music City Center. Five of us from Last Call attended from Monday to Friday.
The first thing we did was attend Monday’s Higher-Ed Summit for our Case Study presentation. We shared a case study on our recent work with the University of Tennessee and their in-progress move to Drupal 8. The case study focused mostly on one aspect of the project: how engaging with prospective students, existing students, faculty, and staff influenced a testable marketing and communications strategy for the University, which then helped us create a prioritized product backlog of features and functionality to support the needs of their community. This presentation was well received and we enjoyed the discussions that followed.
LCM then gave three presentations on Tuesday. Sean Eddings went first, presenting on The Traffic Fallacy and techniques to visualize and organize the flow of work.
Later that same day, Rob Bayliss presented on Horizontal DevOps; scaling your team and tools across projects.
Also in the DevOps track, LCM’s third talk was Getting closer to your customer: Using Drupal in the last mile, by me, Kelly Albrecht.
On the next day, Wednesday, Sean and I conducted our agile methodology training, Getting Real About Agile. We had a much larger group than usual and only two hours. We usually spend a whole day on this training so we had to adapt our program quite a bit, and fortunately things went really well.
As the 2018 Project Management Track Chair, I worked to evolve the track to keep up with current trends. My vision and description for this year’s Project Management Track positioned Project Management as more of an activity than a role.
We had a record number of submissions to this year’s DrupalCon and, for the PM track, we chose nine and scheduled them amongst the rest of this year’s amazing line up. Be sure to explore the PM track for a great mix of agile and traditional project management talks.
In addition to our participation in the regular social activities, Sean also organized Evening Runs on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
This was a great event and we’re already thinking about the next one. Will you be in Seattle in 2019? Let’s connect!
