Perhaps your company or department is considering hiring an external vendor or agency to work on your next project. Maybe your group has already hired an external development team to supplement an internal team. Integrating your in-house Drupal team with developers from an agency or vendor can positively contribute to a project's success, but can also result in resourcing headaches, hidden costs, and unexpected project management overhead. In this session, project managers tasked with managing internal and external developers on one team will gain insights and ideas on how to create and maintain a single team, and learn what pitfalls to avoid.

This session will highlight what to keep in mind while managing combined teams, how improve collaboration when adding external developers to an internal team, and how fostering the experience of a single team results in the ideal outcome. It will also cover mistakes project managers make with combined internal and external teams, how to spot communication breakdowns before they are unmendable, and provide helpful suggestions on how to mitigate issues. Attendees that have some project management experience, and have worked or plan to project manage a combined internal and external team will gain the most from this session.

Also included:

Preparing yourself and your in-house team to work with external developers
Increasing productivity
Ensuring smooth hand-offs and multi-vendor transitions
Resourcing internal and external developers
Managing roles and responsibilities
Note: This session's intended audience is project managers and team leads. The speaker is a senior front-end developer who has more than five years of experience specifically managing and working with many types of mixed teams in a developer capacity. She feels this fresh perspective on project management will offer new and different suggestions to collaboration and team success.