Project Managment
How were your project management skills employed during the development and completion of your project?
It’s essential that we work through this project efficiently and smoothly, especially considering our time constraints and deadlines. As a team, we decided that the best way to maintain communication is to elect a project manager to ensure that we stay on track and achieve our goals. The project managers were Vedant and Haya, who then took the necessary steps to ensure that all team members know what the status of the project is and what their responsibilities are. For the Fall semester, the entire team met twice a week: once during class hours (Tuesday, 5:30-8:30 PM) and once on Fridays to touch base on the progress of tasks or iron out inconsistencies. Additionally, the two project managers met once a week, in a one-on-one meeting, to look over all the tasks, progress, and make needed adjustments to the project workflow.
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Most of the work undertaken in the fall semester was general research or planning for the technical stages of the project. As a result, all members of the group were able to work on these tasks together, in an interdisciplinary manner. However, the tasks in the Winter semester became a lot more specialised. Examples of the tasks undertaken included are, but not limited to, the summarisation the the literature review to develop a baseline and the subsequent development the minimum viable product: the sensor integrated walking stick. Hence, to facilitate the concurrent development of various tasks, the group sub-divided into smaller teams that worked in sprints in order to achieve deliverables that facilitated the overall project. There were 4 sub-divisions in the team, each with a department leader. However, work conducted within these departments weren’t limited to a specific set of group members. Very often, group members bounced around from department to department after each “sprint” to emaphasise the team’s interdisciplinary approach and also facilitate greater creativity within the departments. The 3 departments were the technical, literary, and project management teams, that reconvened weekly during our class times. The teams also met outside class on a flexible basis to work out individual deliverables.
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The technical department was lead by Kevin and Sebastian, who led the team in software and hardware development respectively, and adopted an agile style to facilitate an iterative approach to prototyping. They handled the development of the sensor integrated walking stick, which included the fabrication of components, writing of code, implementation of sensors and the overall calibration of the device.
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The literary department was lead by Angel and Sathini, who led the team in the literature review process and summarisation of findings, and adopted a kanban approach to their workflow. They developed a baseline for out MVP, which in turn enabled us to identify the sensors necessary for data collection. Thus, the literary department worked closely with the technical deepartment by helping inform the work they were conducting.
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The project management team was led by Haya and Vedant, who continued using ther waterfall approach for the project, focusing on the overall project goal in a sequential manner. As in the Fall semester, their primary task was to ensure that project deliverables were achieved on time, which was tracked using the project management website monday.com (https://haya140681.monday.com/boards/3496276563). In the Winter semester, their work also included many financial responsibilities that included applying for funding, liaising with the C4 team and developing a bill of materials as outlined by the literary and technical departments. The PM team also took charge of completing the various tasks outlined by the C4 requriements such as the project journey video and MVP class presentations.
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In conclusion, the team continued the organised work ethic we displayed throughout the fall semester. This was achieved by the strong personalities of the individual group members and structure provided by the project management team. The development of such as organisational structure was enabled by the ITP metrics assignments completed throughout the course of the C4 class, which enabled the project managers to assess the strengths and weaknesses of team members and assign sub-devisions that amplified the strengths and nullified the weaknesses of the teams.
