Project Management
How did we orchestrate everything throughout this entire project? Below, we list the various tools and strategies that helped us stay on top of our milestones and work together as a team.
[Project management] includes the establishment and execution of those tasks and procedures that facilitate the completion of a project within a set of specified parameters.
Brown & Green, 2015, p. 187
Communication Tool
Slack
Almost all communication between team members primarily flowed through the Slack app. Its instant-messaging feature allowed us to keep everyone up-to-date and so it was our first point of contact for anything we needed to discuss or share.
Project Management Tools
Click-up
We initially used ClickUp as our project management tool during the early phases of our design. Through this tool, we were able to manage tasks, set deadlines for deliverables, and request help or reviews from each other.
Miro
However, we eventually replaced ClickUp with Miro since we had been using Miro for our research and data analysis purposes anyway and preferred to centralize the tools we were using wherever possible in order to increase efficiency. (We were initially unaware that Miro offered Kanban capabilities.)
Collaboration Tool
Google Drive
Most of the artifacts we created for this project were organized in our Google Drive folder, which is where we worked on and stored all of our working documents. Below is our comprehensive Master Milestones Document (which includes all of our specific milestones from #1-9).
Strategies
How did we use the tools at our disposal to actually manage and delegate all of our tasks?
Chunking
We split larger milestones down into smaller parts.
This allowed us to work in pairs of 2 to more quickly and efficiently complete the deliverables.
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Organizing to get all 4 team members together at the same time, after all, can be a struggle.
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Groups of 2 were much more efficient and were able to hold each other accountable.
Redundant Roles
Instead of having 1 person per role, we doubled up on the 2 most important ones.
While the conventional method in terms of dividing up roles is to assign something specific to each person, we decided that for the sake of efficiency, it might make more sense to identify the two most important roles for our project and double up on each.
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This way, the project can still continue if someone is busy and unable to contribute. If one Project Manager is occupied, for instance, the other can fill in and lead the project forward.
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We therefore assigned 2 Project Managers and 2 Designers.