This week of class, a new lecturer took stage, what was covered how the importance of planning has on projects, their effectiveness and what effects could take place without any planning. It was interesting to understand the importance of not just planning alone but planning as part of a team. Understanding who is working on what, when, why, as well as setting goals and aiming to reach those goals effectively.
Another area that was crossed that I found useful was getting a grasp of scope and constraints, specific to all projects provided by clients. Needing to understand where I stand, what resources I have and of course the timeline I’ve got is incredibly important. Planning and understanding will play a huge role for success. (The most memorable line I grasped from this was simply to ‘Keep in Scope’.)
The best way to look at my project broken down would be:
The problem statement
The Team
Goal/Vision
Scope & Constraints
Discover >Define >Develop >Deliver
Empathise >Define >Ideate >Prototype >Test
I really enjoyed getting to know how team projects should be organised, planned and distributed, step by step. Unknowingly, following this step based plan, but of course a lot of areas to improve upon.
At first I didn’t full understand how important the Backlog step actually could be. Keeping anything and everything on hold doesn’t really do much harm. Getting to know that they could have a pretty impactful change either early on in planning or later on was pretty helpful.
We split up into our class teams for 20 minutes, with the purpose of discovering and noting our future plans of what we’re going to do, what areas to look at and who is going to do what. Using sticky notes, we took note on areas of interest that we believe may be important to cover.
I felt this as a team was quite a struggle to figure out any ideas to write down, planning for each steps was easy enough, but when it came to question ideation, we decided it would be best until we could get contact with our mentors. The reason for this is, knowing what area our mentor works in will help determine what questions we may want to ask, as well as giving us time to know which issue we want to help improve as a team.
The image of the sticky notes the team came up with was also shared on the teams Miro board for all to access and to also keep as part of our ‘Backlog’.