During this trimester I have worked with a bunch of different types of project management, as well as had the opportunity to be the project manager for our commercialisation project. For this blog I will write about my experience with project management during Darkness Dwells.
After researching around, most industry people (like Heather, and her article) seem to enjoy using WBS (Work Breakdown Software), such as Trello or Hack’N’Plan. Luckily we’ve been using Hack’N’Plan as well as spreadsheets to manage our work during Darkness Dwells, which is something I will discuss below.
The first thing I made sure we did for darkness dwells, as soon as I took the reigns as project manager, was decide to have weekly meetings. I wanted to make sure I knew what was going on with the project at all times. I also made sure that we used source control and Hack’N’Plan, as mentioned above, to plan out our work.
One method I tried out for the first time was week to week planning. I am aware that HNP does this, but I really wanted to be able to look at it in a spreadsheet, along with everyone's responsibilities for that particular week. I think this worked really well because it helped me keep track of what we had to do in the time we had left. This was also updated with time, as we pivoted at a certain point in the development.
Although half of the team were against using it, I enjoy using HNP a lot. It helps me track time and is very useful to keep on top of things and make sure you know what to do. What I encountered as a difficulty during this project, as the project manager, was to motivate my team to continue updating HNP, and unfortunately it reached the point where we stopped using it. But up until the point where that happened, it worked well for us.
In order to keep in contact with everyone we decided to use Discord. However we were told that we had to use Slack for the project, so we sort of altered between the two. The reason for this was because everyone of us was used to using Discord for schoolwork, as it is a very flexible program for chat rooms. We ended up having to remind each other to use Slack, and therefore hopped between the two. In the end, we used Discord to talk to each other and Slack to talk to contributors.
This is one of the few projects I have been project manager for, and unfortunately I have had a better experience in the past. I think it all came down to the fact that I wasn’t engaged enough to take the reigns, and also because no one really wanted to be project manager so I offered to do it. I still have a lot to learn when it comes to controlling a team, but hey, the game is out there and ready to play so I think it went well. I think it would be easier if I was more into the game.
Thank you for reading this rather short blog. My brain is pretty mushy at the end of trimester, so I'm happy I managed to get something about our process in here.