Resources Tools
Below are some tools and resources teams have found helpful in the past. Most of these were discovered by people like you, so if you find a resource or tool that was helpful please let us know! 🚀
w3Develops is a platform to launch opportunities for developers, but another part of w3Develops is researching and developing ways to better facilitate those opportunities. We call this global collaboration lab w3Develops-X, and they are building:
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The Wizard Acts & Milestones - This is a tool to provide structure and a project roadmap for teams to follow. Project Managers will log the team's progress here which will also help us determine what teams need support.
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The Wizard Standups - This is a tool to better facilitate team communication. It will ping you twice a week to answer a few short questions (ex. What did you work on? What are you going to work on? What is blocking your way?) and relay that information back to your team.
A major part of project management is organizing the information you collect from your team and organizing it in a way that is actionable. Tools such as the following help you create a backlog of tasks that can be tracked as they progress through various states such as Next, Blocked, In Progress, Review, and Completed.
Regardless of which tool you might choose, a prime requirement is that the tool must support sharing assignments and progress with the team.
- GitHub Projects
- Trello
- Waffle
- ZenHub
- Google docs (better used as an ideation tool or the intial breaking down of a project to clone)
- Asana
Conducting meetings and pair programming activities both require that you schedule sessions at a date and time that is convenient to all participants. They also require that you and your team select a tool with features to help you to efficiently communicate. These features include audio, video, text messaging, and screen sharing.
Teams may need to be flexible and adapt as need-be to make meetings and pair-programming adventures possible.
Here's an article for Virtual Icebreakers for Remote Teams
Scheduling Meetings and Coordination Tools
Scheduling meetings in an organization like w3Develops Cohorts is complicated by the fact our team mates are spread across many continents and timezones. Coupled with team mate obligations outside of the w3Develops universe, this makes finding meeting times suitable for all team members as difficult as trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.
- Meekan - This is the primary tool we encourage PMs to use for scheduling meeting times. Meekan will be installed in the Cohorts Discord but each member has to activate it with their calendars. PMs may have to Direct-Message members of their team who don't have it activated.
- World Clock Meeting Planner
- Timezone
- Discord
- Google hangouts - great for audio/video meetings and has screenshare functionality. Everyone needs to have a gmail account though.
- Appear.in - some teams swear by this tool for its flexibility and ease of use for doing meetings.
- Jitsi
- Slack
- Talky.io
- Team Viewer
Keeping track of the issues to ensure that they are quickly and permanently resolved plays a major role in improving product quality and lowering technical debt. The rigor your team shows in how they deal with issue reporting reflects their maturity as both a team and in their chosen profession as WebDevs.
Some tools that can be used to introduce the necessary rigor to issue tracking include:
- GitHub Issues
- Waffle.io Integrates into Github Issues
- Airtable.com Bug Tracker Template
- Any kanban system (ex. Trello) which you track bugs, categorize them and work through them.
In your role as a PM you may find the following useful. Project Management Methodologies
Cohorts
- Build-2-Learn Roadmap
- The Cohort Remote Developer Project Process
- The Cohort Handbook
- So I'm Supposed to be a PM for my Remote Dev Team
Project Management Organizations
What kind of resource do you think would be most helpful for PMs?
From Vannya:
I would say first, anything that can help PMs define scope. I'm not just talking about user stories like FCC and others use. But just good info on scope definition to get to an MVP. They can be written in any form. You'll see on my board, we wrote a list of the features, split them into musts and maybes, and defined our scope as the musts. No maybes could be touched without the others complete. SMART is the acronym for scope.....specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time frame (meaning what can be accomplished in the amount of time we have).
I think this has tripped up failing teams the most. They spend either way too much time on scope and lose enthusiasm or don't do it and just code all wild.
Let me see if I can find anything specific to help. 10 Classic Mistakes That Plague Software Development Projects Manage Remote Developers
Second, Basic git functions. The PM HAS to learn git.
-Kornil's articles for sure
How to use Git Effectively Git docs
Seriously, the docs are what I use the most for git when I forget how to use it.
Third, maybe resources to help them first get off the ground. A good start could really get these teams to the finish line stronger.
- Project Kickoff Checklist Infographic
- I'm trying to find something that isn't business focused for project kickoff meetings.
- 5 Scrum Master Advice
Here's another good short read about not overly planning the project out. Just getting a good framework and moving through it.
