#iSoc12 Project management: that’s how we roll
Last year, there were only six of us. Now, there are about 20 of us and a lot of other people swing by. So one word is key: organisation! I’m gonna talk to you about how we handle project management, a little thing called the war table and our ticket board.
Project management
Here’s the presentation that Pieter gave us three weeks ago about how we were going to handle things. Our approach takes the basic idea of scrum (which is to communicate with your teammates continuously) and puts it into three steps: plan & marketing, coding, and testing. We also did something called “What’s new” every two or three days, which I will also explain further.
Miet refined the project management steps and presented them in this handy scheme:
So basically, every team started out thinking about a communication strategy (what does our product want to convey), a design & style to go with it, and an information architecture laying out the flow of the app. After that they started on the code (front-end and back-end) and simultaneously documenting it. At the moment, most of the teams are in the last step: testing (and going back to previous steps where needed).
That’s how the teams managed their projects internally. To keep all of the other teams up to date, we held a “What’s new” every two or three days. One person of each team (usually the project manager) stood up and talked about what they did so far, what they were going to do, what they learned and if they had any problems. That way, people could chime in and help or offer suggestions. We also use Google Docs (or Google Drive, as they now call it) to share anything and everything, and we use GitHub to share code. So basically, all our work is in the cloud.
Jeppe presents his progress on the Ontoforce project during a What’s new.
War table
In the second week, Pieter came with the idea of the war table. It was standing in the middle of the room, and whenever a visitor came by, one team had to pitch their project in about one minute. That way, the teams stayed on top of everything and didn’t loose sight of the bigger picture, and many people also took away some valuable presentation skills from the war table.
Nik and Glenn pitch FlatTurtle to Joke De Nul at the war table.
Ticket board
In the last week, we needed an overview of everyone’s progress while approaching the deadline. So on the whiteboard we drew some tables so that everyone could put the tickets (tasks) for their project under “to do”, “active” or “done”.
Laurens and Hannes update their tickets.
The ticket board as it looked on Tuesday.
Voilà, that is more or less how we roll at iSoc!
