Drupal for Business Professionals

This session is for business leaders, institutional administrators, procurement specialists, and managers who need to understand the basics of how to think about and run a successful Drupal project from start to finish. The assumption is that you will not be doing the actual design, site-building, and development yourself. Instead, this talk will focus on putting together a strategy and building a team to meet both short and long term business goals.

This session will touch on:

• The early planning stages
• The pitfalls of viewing Drupal as a CMS
• Capturing requirements
• Arriving at a budget range
• The RFP dilemma
• Leveraging internal resources
• Working with freelancers
• Bringing in outside vendors
• Understanding the basics of waterfall and agile philosophies
• The design phase
• The development phase
• Quality assurance & formal testing
• Ongoing maintenance and support
• Building an internal support and development team

While this session touches the surface on a wide range of material and strategy, it is not intended to cover any single topic in-depth. This session should be viewed as an introductory roadmap to acquiring a deeper understanding of Drupal project management. Additional resources will be provided during the presentation for those interested in delving deeper into the topics.

About the Speaker
Nathan Kirschbaum is Knectar’s Senior Interactive Producer and Drupal Consultant. He has led numerous business and enterprise-level web projects, working in recent years with organizations such as Harvard Medical School, Tufts, and MIT. Nathan is currently the technical project lead for the Drupal 7 based Jackdaniels.com global CMS project. He contributes regularly to the Drupal community and is an active member of the Drupal Association.