Early last month, I had the privilege to speak at the Xojo Developer Conference in my hometown of Houston about project management tips. I got to discuss many of my favorite things:
- Policies, Processes, and Procedures
- Project Management, including:
- Setting/creating milestones
- Setting client expectations
- Managing change
- Managing Yourself
- Interruption Management (i.e., how to manage your email)
- Value Pricing (a little bit, at least)
- SaaSes that help your productivity
You can download the slides from my presentation, Managing Your Projects (and Yourself) to Success through that link.
I received good feedback from the attendees. Thanks to Kem Tekinay and Patrick Delaney for the kind words. I felt welcomed into the Xojo Tribe and I’m hopeful that long-term relationships were started.
What is Xojo?
Xojo is a software platform, used to create cross-platform desktop, web, mobile & Raspberry Pi apps. It’s used internationally, and, in fact, many of the conference attendees were from around the world. It was fun getting to hear all the accents. It was also humbling to be reminded how we American usually can only speak English and other nations speak more languages.
The session didn’t come off without its hiccups. The first thing I did was walk right out of my microphone while trying to explain why I was passing out Smarties®. Also, I learned that in England, there is a candy known as Smarties and they are made of chocolate. Sadly, I let some people down when they got the American version. And I learned that I might need to try them overseas. (Luckily, there were some awesome A/V guys who helped me get connected back up without too much time lost.)
Then, later in the session, someone’s watch alarm was going off and he didn’t realize it, which led to a team building exercise of finding the culprit.
Acknowledgements
But, overall, the attendees got good value from my presentation. They were very welcoming and I enjoyed meeting the Tribe members. I truly appreciate being given the forum to present my tips on project management. Special thanks to Tim Dietrich for getting me connected with the community and to Dana Brown, Xojo’s Director of Marketing, for finding a place for me in the schedule – which somehow was right after the keynote.
Turns out, it was old home week for me. The conference hotel was only about 2 miles from my parents’ house, so I got to stay with them and catch up. Then, at the end of the first day of sessions, SKYROCKET! played during/after dinner at the conference. In the 90s, I often saw a band, Trish & Darin, in the Houston area. Well, they are in SKYROCKET! So it was nice to catch up with them. (And, by the way, they’re really, really good… albeit perhaps too loud for a conference room. But, I enjoyed it!)
I’ve attached some screenshots below of what several of the Xojo Tribe had to say:
UPDATED: The sessions with slides and audio are available for sale to those who didn’t attend XDC2016. They are available for free to all XDC attendees. There are 33 other sessions other than mine. You can also check out the conference highlights.
For video snippets from the presentation, you can go to the following links:
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