Planning and Managing Drupal Projects

Implementation Plans: Breaking up your work

Another important issue to consider when talking to project stakeholders, and creating project plans, is how you categorize and prioritize your workflow. Since much of what you’re doing in Drupal is managing content and/or creating specific functionality, it’s vital to think, and speak, in terms of specific chunks of content or functionality that you have to create.

For example, Figure 1-3 shows the start of a functional matrix for Urban Homesteaders Unite (UHU), a Drupal project currently in process.

Figure 1-3. Functional matrix for Urban Homesteaders Unite (UHU). Note the specificity of tasks: Create a single taxonomy vocabulary or content type, rather than “all” content types.

By setting up your work this way, you eliminate the confusion that comes with making a statement like “on the week of the 14th, we’re going to be setting up content types.” While this can be perfectly fine if you only have a couple of content types to put together, any site that’s larger than a few pages is likely to have enough complexity that each section of content or functionality will require its own content types, views, wireframes, and even custom page templates or modules—all of which will evolve during the course of the project.

By setting up the project plan with a list of very specific activities that will be done according to the tasks that must be accomplished ...