079 Help Your ColdFusion Team Find Flow (7 keys to PM success) with Christine Ballisty

Christine Ballisty talks about “Help Your ColdFusion Team Find Flow (7 keys to PM success)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Contents

Episode Highlights
Mentioned in this episode
Topic: The DPM's Guide to Creating Project Flow for Digital Teams
Description:
Bio
Links
Interview Transcript:

Episode Highlights

The role of a digital project manager today
- beyond managing tasks, schedules and budgets
- Her background in UI and web designer
Hats I wear
- Account Manager
  - Positive biz relationship
  - Check-in calls
  - Planning ahead for enhancements
- Business Analyst
  - Requirements and wireframes
  - Images help
- Project Manager
  - Whiteboard
- Support Representative
What is Flow, why is it so important today for you and your team
- Flow = complete focus in current task, in the zone
- Protect CF developers from interruptions
  - prioritize
- Work smart vs multitask
- Many hats
- “Spin cycle” – work never ends
- Productive, efficient and happy
7 keys to success
- Plan for everything
  - That my team has what
  - PM tools
    - Google calendar – multiple calendars, color-coded, vacation tracking, blocking off time
    - Liquidplanner for resource allocation and projects and due dates and completion date, PDF timelines
    - Trello – boards of tasks and break by phases and person. Drag and drop cards
  - Slack with bots and status controls for DND mode
    - A channel per project
    - Can be noisy – mute channels, mark self DND, use red emoji for not available
    - On desktop and phones for immediate response
    - If Then This That
    - Monthly time logging reminder
    - Trello card comment reminder
    - Fun reminders of birthdays etc
- Practice gratitude
  - Better happiness and productivity and creativity
  - Leads to flow
  - Kindness matters – shows that you care, flow more, better relationships with coworkers
- Banish ‘the Ego’
  - Including complaining and negative thinking and talk
  - Important person in the company, not a cog in the machine
  - Clear priorities vs urgent – take a step back
  - Focus on our shared end goals
  - Music
    - Above and Beyond (EDM)
    - Jaytech
    - Brain.fm
    - Spotify search for look-alike track
- Health is wealth!
  - Self care before you help others
  - Block self time in your calendar
    - Massage
    - Trip planning
    - Fun food at lunch
    - Lunchtime walk with coworkers
      - Might vent to release problems
    - Surprise coworkers with a coffee etc
  - Healthy people are happier and more productive
  - Care about
  - Enough Sleep helps me
    - Busy brain
    - Lavender essential oil diffuser by bed
    - Stay off phone by bed – don’t play games in bed
    - White noise app (fan, rain etc)
    - Melatonin
- Set and shape expectations
  - Client expectation and reality match
    - And stay match during project
    - Evernote recap of all client meetings
      - Train clients to expect this
      - No misunderstandings
      - Less client anxiety
      - Client can use in their internal communication
    - Start by listening and reflecting back
      - Shared goals
- Choose your battles
  - You will have fights – but you can choose which ones to respond to
  - Find solutions to end goal first
  - Keep emotions out of it
- Have fun!
  - lastly, but not least of all,
  - Quarterly fun team events, coffee dates, draw pictures on each other whiteboards
  - Separate offices shared with one other person
  - Extra day
  - Remote developers
    - screen shares
    - Daily stand up meetings
    - Video chats
    - Liberal Work from home policy
Why are you proud to work with Mura and CF?
WWIT to make CF more alive this year?
What are you looking forward to at MuraCon?

Mentioned in this episode

Topic:
The DPM's Guide to Creating Project Flow for Digital Teams

Description:

The role of a digital project manager today goes well beyond managing tasks, schedules, and budgets. DPMs are tasked with communicating direction, interpreting vision, foreseeing issues, managing dependencies and maintaining the health of their team during the process. DPMs are account managers, business analysts, project managers, scientists and sometimes the therapist. Considering this rapidly changing role, there is a lot of opportunity for error. In this session, Christine Ballisty (Sr. Project Manager of Blue River) will share what it takes to be a digital project manager in this day and age and provide insights on how to effectively create a flow for her projects, clients, and her team.

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.

What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.

And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.

You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.

All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.

Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.

No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens Next

ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist

Modern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.

√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production

√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading

√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF

√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free!

Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

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Bio

With almost 10 years of project management experience at the enterprise-level, Christine Ballisty has a wealth of expertise and understanding in effectively conceiving and executing complex software application and web development solutions. Christine has a successful track record of positive feedback from clients, key partners and colleagues with a proven ability to single-handedly manage a pool of onsite & remote Application Developers & User Interface Designers.

As she frequently manages several projects simultaneously, Christine also oversees budgets and cares for project lifecycles in an experienced, proficient and meticulous manner; all in tandem with leading the Project Management Office of Blue River. She currently provides oversight and guidance to a number of project managers and coordinators in the Professional Services division.

Interview Transcript:

Michaela 0:01
Welcome back to the show here we're going to look at helping your call fusion team find flow, seven keys project management success. And I'm here with Christine all misty saying your last name right? Because I didn't practice it for a solid I should have done and we're going to look at the role of a modern project manager on cold fusion a mirror projects to hats you might wear as a project manager and what is flow and why is it so important today for you and your team and we'll go through seven keys she has for success in your project. So welcome, Christine. Thank you.

And in case you don't know, she is the Senior Project Manager at Blue River and oversees mega mural, CMS cold fusion projects and keeps them meticulously on track and in budget. So a genius

Yes, she's gonna be speaking on this top pick at Mira con in just three days, I think. Right. So four days a few days. So very exciting. And we'll talk a bit more about miracles later in the episode. But would I look at those different things. And let's just start off with how do you see the role of a digital project manager? I'm kind of curious why you call yourself a digital project manager?

Christine Ballisty 1:26
Yes. So the reason why we've been using the label as digital project manager is because all the projects I manage our digital projects or web sites, their applications on the back end or intranets, things like that they're not construction projects or projects where you have a tangible products that you can hand out at the end of the life cycle. It's all digital based.

Michaela 1:51
And how does that affect what you do?

Christine Ballisty 1:54
Well, for me, it doesn't have too much of an impact, because that's my specialty, you managing digital projects. My specialty is in managing custom application development along with websites and internets. And so for me, having that moniker of a digital product manager is pretty much a perfect fit.