Category Archives: Self Development

Preparing for my First Drupalcon

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I’m heading to my first Drupalcon in New Orleans next week. While I’m a very technical project manager who has worked on website implementation projects with content management systems or other integrations, I’ve never worked in or on a Drupal project. This is really my husband’s area of expertise.  Carson has been to several Drupalcons, but still spent quite a bit of time debating between the business and technical track. You can read his blog post on it if you’re interested in his thoughts. I struggled a bit with my own planning so I am hoping a blog post on it would help organize my own thoughts.

I attended Drupal GovCon last year where I participated in mostly the business sessions. I wrote about that experience too. Going into this Drupalcon, I have many of the same goals that I had last summer: learn more about Drupal and make some good contacts in the Drupal community. As I was looking through the different sessions, I did not want to hyper-focus on any one particular track as I have personal & professional interests in business, project management, women in drupal and the learning more about the technical side of Drupal. I’m not sure this aligns to the typical attendee. This made my initial pass through the different sessions a bit frustrating. I walked away thinking that there wasn’t a lot of sessions that interested me and concerned that I would be wasting my time. I was a bit more successful the second time around, and by that time the Birds of Feather “BOF” (adhoc sessions) were available.

Monday was easy! Carson participated in the business summit at last year’s Drupalcon and got a lot out of it. This year I’m participating in it, while he attends the government summit.  This is a great opportunity to learn from other Drupal agencies. Businesses in the Drupal community tend to really open up their books and processes and experiences in a way that other businesses don’t. I attribute that to the core principles of giving back if you participate in the open source community.

On Tuesday, I’m mixing up technical sessions with business ones. After my first Dries keynote, I start off my day with a session on understanding data structures and am definitely going to the session on how to get more involved in the open source community. Beyond that, I’m still bouncing between critical metrics for your business and teaching drupal to kids; case study on leveraging drupal to deliver business results beyond clicks, conversions & revenue and building a remote drupal shop. I’m also going to the BOF for small business owners to share ideas. Then we’ll head over to the Women in Drupal event we’re sponsoring.

Wednesday is focused on the business side of things. I’m hoping the writing great case studies for drupal.org will allow me to pick up some skills for writing great case studies for anyone. Then I’ll be learning about selling the value of new drupal 8 technical features, and finding my purpose as a drupal agency. There is only one time slot where I have not decided yet. Is it the session on Drupal community as an example of diversity in tech or implementing performance metrics and dashboards for your digital agency or productive collaboration of sales and project management as a means to drive customer satisfaction? Before we head off for more socializing, I’ll participate in the account management to customer success evolution BOF.

Thursday is the last day of sessions. I’m going to learn about successful drupal integrations then focus on growing talent & margins within your organization.

I am excited to participate and think I came up with a good schedule. Lucky for me, I’m not locked into any one of these and can easily bounce between sessions as the floor plan  & timing permits.

 

Wisdom learned from the NOVA Ice Dogs Tier 2 U-16 Girls Team

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My 17 year old daughter competed at USA Hockey Tier 2 Nationals last weekend. This was the culmination of many years of hard work for the girls and the coaches. This was the third year that her team declared “national bound”, meaning they would compete for for the right to represent the Southeast division at the National competition. Going into this tournament, our team was ranked 31st in the country, and were scheduled to play the 1st and 2nd ranked teams. Needless to say there was quite a bit of excitement and nerves surrounding the competition. I think we all have a lot to learn about handling ourselves based on this experience.

Rank doesn’t mean much

As I mentioned, the Northern VA (NOVA) Ice Dogs were ranked 31st in the country going into the tournament. Throughout the entire season, the team has been playing teams up and down the east coast. These girls definitely played up, or down, to the level of their competition. We saw them be extremely competitive to teams in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New Jersey but then lose to teams they should have beaten locally. This tournament was no different. The girls lost their first game to the 2nd ranked team 0-6, won their second game  and then lost to the 1st ranked team by only 2 points (0-2). Going into this last game, the girls were nervous. It was an evening game so they had all day to dwell on it, but played their hearts out. They had several scoring chances and played solid defense. The girls left that game knowing they deserved to be at Nationals.

I think we’ve all had experiences where we weren’t the first choice. We may know this to be true, or worse, just be worrying that it’s the truth. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter where you ranked in the process, you got it. You earned it. Stop dwelling and move on to get the job done.

Keep your head held high

The team worked very hard to get to Nationals, playing more than 60 games in regular season. This is highly unusual for National bound teams, as they tend to be more select tournament-only players, playing on other teams during regular season. Our girls did it. They made it to Nationals, but lost. The girls walked out of the locker room after their last game with their heads held high. As they should!

We all have had experiences where we’ve done everything we can but it doesn’t work out. That’s really ok. Walk away from that experience with your head held high, knowing there was nothing more for you to do.

Tenacity & Determination

During the regular season playoffs, and then again during the Southeast division playoffs, the NOVA Ice Dogs had multiple games where the opposing team took the lead about half way through. In each of these games the NOVA Ice Dogs came back to win. They could have walked away, demoralized and out of the game. They didn’t. They fought back and succeeded.

The obvious moral to the story is to regroup and refocus when things aren’t going your way.

 

 

The Curse of Your Procrastination

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There are an abundance of articles on procrastination – ways to avoid it, reasons why it exists, etc. I wasn’t able to find many resources on how procrastination negatively impacts other people. When it comes to procrastination, It’s really not all about you! Your procrastination is impacting everyone you work and/or interact with.Procrastination Chart

As a project manager, this comes up quite a bit. The project manager diligently breaks down the work, assigns the baseline schedule and owns overall responsibility of making sure the work gets done. We rely on the project team to fulfill their responsibilities and ensure the work gets completed. If a single project team member procrastinates on any single task, it will have a trickle down effect on all other tasks that need to be completed. Procrastination by definition is the avoidance of doing tasks that need to be done. This does not include the scenarios where work goes more slowly as a result of a problem or new information. This is truly the work that a resource puts off because he/she just doesn’t want to do it.

While project managers know that this is a common enough occurrence, I think it’s human nature to assume your procrastination isn’t hurting anyone other than yourself. But in reality, it will impact anyone directly linked to you. A couple of days ago I got into an argument with my daughter for this exact topic. Her high school requires that each student fulfill 15 hours of community service during the course of the school year. While 15 hours over 10 months doesn’t seem that cumbersome, my daughter plays ice hockey September-March. She is on the ice 6 days a week and has to fit homework and other responsibilities on top of that.

Now that we are winding down hockey season, I asked her to conduct some research and  identify opportunities she could do over spring break. She promptly told me she “had it covered’ and would fulfill the hours, but when I pushed her for more details, she had nothing to offer. She assumed that I was pushing her because I didn’t trust her. That really had nothing to do with it. In prior years, we had to scramble to get everything done in time, rushing around in the last minute. Given my other projects and responsibilities, I need her to plan more effectively. I got quite frustrated with her as there is no real effort to do the research (the school provides a list of pre-approved organizations and activities). In this case, her procrastination doesn’t just have the potential for disrupting her grade, it will most likely disrupt my schedule as we have to cram 15 hours over the next month (and she doesn’t drive yet).

As you push off until later the thing you need to do today, please consider the impact you will have on those around to you.

What’s your Super Power?

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Ms. Hucek’s First Grade Superheroes!This morning as I was trying to identify a topic for this week’s blog post, I came across this  post from The.Project.Management.Hub on what superpower you wish you had as a project manager. This reminded me of the icebreaker activity at last night’s STEM for Her Volunteer Appreciation event.

I recently read Strategic Connections and was very interested in the mechanics of how people introduce themselves during networking. While I hadn’t really thought about it beforehand, I was definitely able to relate to the problem of having a conversation shut down once names, titles & companies were exchanged. While I was planning the volunteer appreciation event, I really wanted to make everyone feel welcome and make networking easy. Instead of the attendees getting bogged down in the details of companies and titles, I created an ice breaker focused on each person’s super power. Since these were all women affiliated with advancing the #stemforher mission, I thought there might be some pretty interesting responses. I was not disappointed.

Today, I’m going to share some of these super powers with the hope of inspiring you to think about yours.

Connection

This super power allows you to quickly assess the needs of people and bridge the gap to other people who can help. The connectors among us establish lasting relationships and generously share of their network.

Leap tall buildings in a single bound

This super power allows you to overcome large obstacles and deliver amazing results. This  power allows you see beyond the problem obstructing your path and allows you to create the plan to circumvent it.

Seeing the future

The ability to see the future puts you ahead of the game. You can anticipate the direction and adjust your plan to fulfill your goals.

Shapeshifting/transformation

This super power allows you to be malleable to any situation. This power makes it easy to  adapt to the temperament, setting and character of any situation. It allows you to rise above the fray to be successful and deliver your desired outcome.

Time travel

This super power combines the ability to see the future with anticipating issues before they arise. Time travelers can adjust quickly to prevent small issues from escalating.

I hope you were inspired to think about your super power – that unique thing that you do really well and allows you to excel at whatever you do. I also hope you’ll consider sharing it with me the next time we meet. Instead of saying “Hi, I’m Dagny Evans, Managing Director at Digital Ambit”, let’s initiate our conversation with “Hi, I’m Dagny Evans, I use my time travel super power to successfully deliver complex data projects.” It sounds a lot more interesting!

 

The 4 things I’m thankful for

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As we wind down the work week and gear up for Thanksgiving, it seemed appropriate to write a blog post about everything I’m thankful for. I generally try to be polite and say thank you, but in business I feel that some cultures have gone overboard with the thank you culture. I think it is a silly practice to say thank you ever time someone sends an email, sets up a call or does basic tasks within their job function. If overused, I find it cheapens the sincerity of the praise. I would much rather get praise for going above and beyond what was expected of me.

We are 9 months in to running our business as our sole source of income, but have been running it off an on for the last 3 years. During that time, we didn’t ask our friends & family for monetary contributions, but we did rely heavily on them for support and input.

The 4 things I’m thankful for are:

  1. Our parents – Both sets of parents were entrepreneurial. We were raised in environments where we were constantly involved in new adventures. Some worked and some didn’t, but that was ok. We were raised to take chances. Without this instilled spirit, we might never have jumped ship from safer, more stable jobs for other people.
  2. Our family – It’s often written about the stress the entrepreneurial lifestyle has on families. Our immediate and extended family, related or adopted, have all been extremely supportive. Our daughters got involved as interns, learning real-world development tools, designing real-world solutions. They have patiently and quietly stood by as we’ve changed or over-ruled plans to accommodate travel, business meetings, networking, etc.
  3. Our friends & colleagues – Our friends & colleagues are fantastic. We had an overwhelming response to our newsletter launch and our friends have been the source of our work. On top of that, many have been around to talk shop and share their expertise in all things, from sales processes to government contracting.
  4. The startup community – I have spent much of the last 9 months learning and growing. I couldn’t have done it without the help of Community Business Partnership, DC Web Women, Women in Technology, Drupal agencies and conferences, plus various other organizations, conferences, meetups, and events. Each of those made talking about our business easier, gave me tips, tricks and tools to leverage within my business and all were open and willing to share their experiences.

turkeyTo everyone who I’ve met along my journey, thank you for sharing, caring & supporting me on this new adventure. Have a Happy Thanksgiving! 

 

 

Size Matters: How Fast to Grow your Business

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Last night I had the pleasure of joining Jennifer Key from Chief and Heather Cox from Mighty Little Web Shop at the DC Web Women Speaker Series on growing your business. We all came at it from a different perspective, highlighting our unique experiences. I spoke about my experience at different startups and how their growth decisions shaped their conclusions as well as my decisions. Jennifer talked about her personal journey grounded in intention, culture and risk.  Heather spoke about the flows and ebbs of business, which ultimately led her to focus on a very specific niche.

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I consider myself an entrepreneur, but Digital Ambit is really my first business. I guess I’ve been closer to a entrepreneur groupie, or maybe just entrepreneurial employee. I’ve had several opportunities to come into businesses early on and help them grow. Some took VC funding, and other self-funded. Some suffered their demise by way of the exuberant spending of the dotcom bubble. While others sold for a hefty profit or pivoted and continued on as a smaller, boutique offering.

Jennifer opened her talk by mentioning that she can’t tell others how to grow their businesses as she doesn’t know them or their businesses. However, she can outline the drivers of her growth, which contributed to the growth of the businesses she’s been involved with. There are 3 critical components she comes back to when evaluating opportunities: intention, culture and risk. Every day, Jennifer starts her day by setting her intention. While these days these are focused on gratitude and kindness, they do fluctuate. By setting your intention, you ground your decisions. Business culture is what drives employees and founders to do what they do every day. Businesses need to decide what their culture will be, and as they grow will need to figure out how to sustain that culture. Sometimes the culture isn’t sustainable, and that’s ok. Although a loss or change in culture may shift employees away. Lastly, business (or personal) growth is about risk. Jennifer herself is risk adverse, but she surrounds herself with mentors and friends who encourage her to take calculated risks.

Heather wants to be a rockstar when she grows up, singing her songs and playing the guitar. In the meantime, she’s focused her business on a niche market and learning what she needs to in order to grow her business. For a long time, Heather didn’t have to market her business. The leads just flowed in. She started this business to engage her dream of building websites and developing marketing strategy for her customers. She opted for packaged pricing so she’d never have to write another proposal. She also participated in some extensive marketing and accelerator programs to learn what she needed to know. Heather is quick to admit she sticks to the basics of understanding her numbers, but has clear size, revenue and margin goals she focuses on every day.

Overall, i saw some clear themes in our stories.

  1. Optimism – Although I wouldn’t consider myself very optimistic, I do have confidence that I can learn and conquer anything I want. “They aren’t problems, they’re possibilities” and “there are no obstacles, but rather opportunities” were a few of the catch phrases of the evening. They definitely highlight the optimistic nature of being an entrepreneur. Some days are scary, but you need to fundamentally believe you can reach your goals.
  2. Mentorship -We all talked about people we worked with that gave us their time and expertise when you need it. Jennifer reminded us to that we need to value our mentors time and make sure to set an agenda so you can work on what you need. There are formal and non-formal mentoring programs, but any opportunity for networking is an opportunity to find one.
  3. Culture – Heather has really molded her business around the things she likes to do, removing or outsourcing the things she doesn’t. That will make for a very deliberate culture. Chief is known for community engagement and built that into their office space. They have a space dedicated for entertaining and host numerous meetup and other groups on a regular basis. I’m building this business with my husband to drive the culture and lifestyle we want. The choices we make in our business will all come back to why we started it and what we want.
  4. Know your numbers – It’s imperative to understand what’s going on in your business. Without that how do you know if or when you can hire? How do know what’s success? or slow down? You don’t need to be the accountant, but you do need to keep an eye on your critical metrics. Identify a few critical ones that tie to your goals and watch them closely.

I don’t care what you think “success” looks like!

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I read an article this week about a Bain & Co. study that found that women enter the workforce with higher aspirations than men and the confidence they can get there. According to the study, this changes dramatically only 2-3 years into career development. After a couple of years, women start “losing confidence in their ability to fit the stereotype of what ‘success’ looks like at an American Company. The study postulates that it is a “deeply ingrained ideal worker, one who worked long and late, took on extra projects, was adept at self-promotion and was always connected” where women and men judge women more harshly.

I have always been attracted to startup or small businesses. This probably has a lot to do with having growing up with parents who ran several, all with varying degrees of success. These organizations gave me the opportunity to learn in a variety of roles. I never mastered one finite set of skills, but was able to move around, become very well-rounded. I left my first real job in 2000 to go to grad school, as I saw the exuberant spending and little return. After I got my MBA, I joined another startup. This one was acquired by a large (for me), publicly traded company. While I spent 3 years there, I jumped ship in 2011 to much surprise and criticism. I now run a consulting company with my husband.

Am I successful? Some people would argue that I’m not. They might question my decisions to leave organizations as failing to work within the confines of corporate america.  I prefer to say that I have defined my own success. I have filled many roles from technical to business, back-office to customer facing. I helped grow several startups. I have gone out on my own and proven that I can not only survive there, but more importantly I can thrive here. I get to pursue my personal vision and mission. I get to leverage all my experience and help different organizations fulfill theirs. I do this on my own time with my own set of rules.

I would highly recommend you stop worrying about how other define success. It is much less important what society says your success should look like. Forge your own path, defining your own success. I suspect once you think about it, you’ll realize that you’ve already reached it. Or at minimum, it’s in your sights.

Be a resource, not a commodity!

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I had the chance to see David Belden (founder of ExecuVision International) deliver his keynote at yesterday’s Association of Proposal Management Professionals-National Capital Area (APMP-NCA) Mid-Atlantic Conference. The topic of the keynote was “Relieving Anxiety in the Procurement Landscape.” At face value this didn’t sound particularly interesting, but just a few short minutes into the presentation I found myself taking my notebook out to starting taking notes. The key take away for me had less to do with anxiety and more about positioning ourselves to be resources, or risk being reduced to commodity status.

We all know that selling on price is not the ideal position. We also know that the pace of business has significantly increased. Unfortunately, only these two things matter when you are a commodity. I think we also know, at least conceptually, that adding value to your customers is how you differentiate yourself. Often we attempt to add value by sharing our methods and solutions for free. While these points are not new concepts, Mr. Belden really drove home the idea that every product or service is on the path to commoditization. He further concluded that our inherent reaction to differentiate ourselves results in becoming the commodity we feared we would become. Customers begin to know, or think they know, enough to comparison shop your solution. These are sobering thoughts as we work to grow our consulting company.

As for the preventative strategy, Mr. Belden challenged us to listen closely to our clients and prospects, with special attention paid towards their anxiety. Embracing your client’s anxiety allows you to become a valuable resource to them and can open up other areas of opportunity for you.

Teaching data science to my teenage daughter

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Note: This post is a bit long, but it’s the story behind the evolution of our project to teach data analytics and data science to a teenager, leveraging her love of ice hockey.

There are a few times during my career where I have made decisions, that were in retrospect, a lot better for my family than I initially thought. At the time I made the decision, I did weigh the impact of the decision on my family, but there have been 2 that were really the best things that could have happened. The first was back in 2011 when I quit my job. My younger daughter was struggling in school and having the time and flexibility to get her the help she needed would have been extremely difficult if I had been working the schedule I had been. The second happened recently. In March I left another job to join my husband in the full-time running of our business. Since March, I’ve been able to spend one-on-one time with each of my daughters, taking separate spring break trips. And more importantly (at least for this post), I was able to work with Cayla, our 16 year old, during her summer internship project.

This story begins when we decided in the spring that we were going to hire Cayla as an intern in Digital Ambit, our software and data integration consulting business. At the time we knew we wanted to use this time productively, specifically we hoped to teach Cayla some technical skills. The most obvious route would have been to have Carson teach her programming. However, Carson was more than 100% utilized in our consulting business, where I had a bit more available time working on the business. We needed to be able to get Cayla some tech skills, without severely impacting Carson’s ability to deliver on our billable work. This left me to figure something out.

My background is fairly diverse, with time spent in both technical and software skills. I consider myself a technical project manager, truly leveraging my technical skills to manage customers and projects. While I can manage any technical project or implementation, my actual technical experience focuses on databases and data management. I had recently taken some data science Coursera courses and had dipped my toe in the R world. I finally decided Cayla was going to do a data analytics/science project to take hockey statistics and see if she could predict who will win next year’s Stanley Cup.

I bought Cayla a couple of books on data science for business and practical data science with R. I knew Cayla had never studied statistics and had a few concerns about the complexity of resources written about data science and R. I made Cayla write a blog to make sure she could articulate the material she was learning. Once she started picking up some of the basics, we talked through the project at a very high level so Cayla knew what the next steps were. This was very much a hands on project for her. She had to find the data, download the data, cleanse the data, and figure out the R syntax to load and analyze the data. I gave her space to work through issues, especially after the first few times she told me she had an issue with R and after asking if she had confirmed the syntax, pointing out the missing comma or syntax error.

We were about a month into the project before Cayla could bring all the pieces together and really explain what she was trying to do. She could relate the daily work to the project, and had mapped out her next steps to align to her business question (“Who will win the next Stanley Cup?”). At this same time, we learned we had been accepted to present this story to the DC Web Women Code(Her) conference. This intensified the pressure, and added a hard deadline of September 12, 2015.

This is where it got a bit difficult for Cayla. At this point she had gotten all the data she thought she needed, cleansed it (or so she thought), and had found  at least one way to calculate the historical means, and populate the 2015-2016 statistics. The complex nature of the statistical models and the applicable documentation caused this to be a real sticking point for Cayla. Unfortunately, the method she had been using, along with her still dirty data made reproducibility and data modeling extremely difficult.

At this point, I stepped in to help in a more hands on way. I knew that I wanted to create an R script to share during our presentation, so I started walking through Cayla’s syntax. Sometimes things that work in isolation, don’t work the best when combined with the other methods you applied. It took some intense focus to step through the process, cleanse the data to acceptable R processing standards, and leveraging different syntax for historical means and filling gaps. The hardest part was finding clear, concise examples of people who had done this before. Ultimately, I was able to find syntax that worked to run models against the data and analyze the data. We were not successful in getting the model to predict any winners.

I think Cayla and I both learned a lot from this project. Cayla learned that she can do really hard things, she’s never done before. Cayla also learned about planning and organizing data projects, and how truly difficult, but incredibly important, it is to clean your data. I learned that Cayla can learn anything with the right incentive, or within the framework of something that interests her. I also learned that in data analytics and science, more people need to publish their work in simpler forms. Please don’t assume everyone has a PHD.

We presented our story at the Code(Her) conference on Saturday. Cayla reinforced her knowledge of data science during the Intro to Machine Learning session, and seemed to have fun learning agile principles while playing games. The day culminated with us presenting to a room full of women. It was really rewarding to see how well Cayla did, and to see how many wanted to hear us.

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To see our detailed presentation and additional materials, visit my github page.

Don’t take for granted how far you’ve come

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I’m inspired to write this by my 16 year old daughter, who is also our summer intern. I’ve written about her before so I won’t spend too much time on background info. Cayla will start her junior year of high school in about two weeks, and this is Cayla’s first job. She agreed to do it because she had nothing else to do. My husband and I definitely had high hopes for her. Not only did we want her to start developing skills she would need after high school, we also hoped that she would start developing an interest in technology, aside from just personal use. She’s spent the last two months helping consolidate and organize our marketing list; started on Node School; and started learning R so she could work on her data science project to predict who will win the next Stanley Cup. Cayla also started pulling the data she needs for her project and working through her project plan.

Throughout all this, I’ve been amazed by the basic skills in business (and business applications), data management, and project management that I take for granted. There have been ample opportunities this summer for me to realize how far I’ve come since I started my first professional job.

Basic Skills in Business Applications – My experience is all very business and analytics intensive. As part of that, I’m very familiar with vlookups (using one data element in one spreadsheet to dynamically find the data element in another spreadsheet), pivot tables, advance sorting and grouping. While it made sense to make sure to teach Cayla how to do vlookups and pivot tables (as needed), it never crossed my mind that we would need to show her how to sort by multiple columns. Or, that she could use Excel functions to find duplicates, or convert names to the same format using the split text function plus a formula to reformat them. After the first time Cayla spent 5 hours adding the same value to multiple records by copying the cell and paste over and over again, it was very clear that I needed to be more explicit in the instructions and guidance I gave. These are basic lessons that I didn’t even realize everyone didn’t know.

Data Management – Cayla has been working with downloading, cleansing and analyzing NHL statistics for the last couple of weeks. We have had several discussions around computers being stupid and doing exactly you tell them to do. When the computer displays duplicate records, instead of grouping by a single identifier, I am quick to recognize that something is different about the records. Cayla was always more inclined to say that nothing was different as she was looking at the superficial value of the player name. Once she started diving into the data, she found spaces, tick marks and commas that wreaked havoc on her data analysis.

Project Management – I know that everyone works differently, but I’m a huge believer in documentation. I’m an avid notetaker, in my handy dandy hardcopy, spiral bound notebook. I red ink (and blue and green…) spec documents, log detailed questions and explanations and am quick to make sure everyone involved gets the information. I don’t believe in hoarding information. I assumed this was a way of life. It’s really not. No matter how many times I have coached Cayla about clearly documenting her project work, or outlining her blog post, this is not intuitive or comfortable to her. I’m a firm believer that developing these skills will help her feel more organized, help her remember or reference information better and would make communication in whatever form, easier for her.

Each of these are just a small subset of the examples I encountered this summer mentoring and leading Cayla. As we continue to mentor and sponsor people, we need to remember how far we have come. Let’s take a step back and make sure we convey the information required for people to learn the critical skills we have. They may not retain them all, but the good ones will definitely adapt some of those skills as their own.