Project Management

After experiencing some challenges with a Drupal developer, the owner of TheLegalBalance.com looked for a new developer. I was hired to take the existing theme design and make it the Drupal fee-base community she wanted.

The USAID Knowledge Driven Microenterprise Development (KDMD) Portal is a Drupal-based portal of sites built on a single-installation of Drupal 6.x. My role with the QED Group includes both liaising with QED’s web development vendor during the site development process and helping to build internal Drupal capacity among the KDMD team.

The QED Group contracted with me to help them with the Drupal implementation projects. For this project I was asked to assess a site they had received from their developer and then help them bring the project to launch.

In the early 1990's, the VP of TRW's System's Division was strongly encouraging the use of continuous improvement processes (CIP) to improve the way employees performed their work. The goal was to increase customer satisfaction and thus increase the probability of continued business and growth. I was one of the division's process improvement agents at the time. If memory serves me, I was asked to write up a summary of the work my improvement team was doing so that others would be motivated to do the same. Below is what I wrote. I share this with you in fun so please have fun reading it.

Drupal's Organics Group module(s) enables more than community building. Check out Using OG for Project Management Support on IDCM Innovations' group site.

If you do a search for Drupal jobs, the most common jobs listed are Drupal developer, Drupal themer, and Drupal designer. If you look at the skills required for each, they say basically the same thing: HTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, and Drupal experience. If the job is graphic, you might see additional requirements such as Photoshop, Flash, etc. I wonder what the person will be doing in these jobs. Is a developer the same as a coder or is a developer the person who builds the Drupal site?

Check out Get Things Moving with a Facilitator by Dee-Ann LeBlanc, Open Source and Open Standards Contributing Editor, CMSWire.com on the Linux Foundation's Developer Network.

Most of us have either heard of someone being certified to do something or maybe we have been through a certification process ourselves. Depending on the certification, the process could be to simply take a test. Or, it could be more involved such as to include one or more of the following: multiple exams, training, education degrees, experience, recommendations, and demonstration projects.

But how does a certification program come into existence? What needs to be considered? Again, it depends.