Project managing, managing expectations

They are like me when i started out as a project manager, no idea of what the project involves or what value it provides.

It's up to you to show them that value.

It's very important that you not let anything get to you as a PM.

Have to be very clear that custom code has to be reported.

"How much Drupal do you feel you have to know? Our project managers want to know Drupal but they don't want to build sites. How much about Drupal, about development, do project managers have to know?"

We started with picking up copies of "Using Drupal".

Important to tell clients when their small request will likely take a lot of time: "That's not the Drupal way of doing that, so it will cost much more money."

Chris:

We document everything. We make videos for everyone [every client]. We put them on YouTube. We go to the site, do the training there, video it, write it up. That works better for bigger projects.

We have training professionals and a support team.

Amye:
For me it's the opposite, i touch pretty much every piece of project managing, training, and support.

Chris:
Showing the client all that you can do, the entire spec, is playing with fire-- for them to see all that is possible, they expect and ask for everything.

Yes, fixing that would be good, but that's a change order.

"Agile process and change orders? What's the deal?"

Could have a deep discussion of the philosophy of agile, everyone has their own flavor. We only file change orders for pretty significant thing.

"Who manages the content?"

That should be a whole new area of discussion. We have copywriters we can work with

Content is the last thing we handle, we do it with the training, we train them on the content.