MECHENG401:PM
PM
It has become apparent to us (the student team members) and presumably the other stakeholders in this project that the current approach to project management taken by the software students is not yielding the required results. This has largely been due to the workload we are under, but also due to poor communication and teamwork among ourselves.
Consequently we have decided to lift our game and get some quality organisation in place.
We feel that with concrete well defined goals, meeting times and time frames we will make better progress.
So:
SE students will meet every Monday at 12 noon. We will show (to each other) success on our task for the previous week, and assign tasks for the next week.
These tasks will be small, achievable in 1 week of moderate work, and have a clearly demonstrable outcome at the end.
We need to take control over the scope and time frame of the project, and start to make some reasonable estimates.
I (Nick) have consistently been making optimistic estimates in the hope that they will motivate us to meet them, and we are obviously consistently not meeting them. This is also because we are working with technology not entirely familiar to us and are exploring new boundaries every time we attempt a task.
These weekly tasks will come from the high level large scale tasks we have been set by the stakeholders, and for the remainder of the University Semester we have enough information to allow us to set our own smaller tasks and move towards the outcomes requested by the stakeholders.
We cannot afford to take on more input and allow the definition of the tasks we have to do to expand. That being said, we do need stakeholder input. After Tuesday 2 June we plan to have a working system. At this stage we will be able to allow the potential end users to use the software first hand and discover bugs, incorrect assumptions by us, further features they would like, usability issues and more. The information given to us from this will allow us to generate more small tasks for us to work on. This means that any feedback on these areas will have to be written down, quantified, explained and illustrated with diagrams, screenshots of pictures, to enable us to make best and most efficient use of it.