Now that our Developing Librarian group has been formed into teams (see message immediately below), we have turned our attention to the areas of project planning and management.
On March 4, our meeting was devoted to a project management workshop with Mitch Brodsky from the New York Philharmonic. Two important takeaways were as follows:
- agree upon the minimal content and functionality required for the initial launch of your project and
- an excel spreadsheet can serve as an easy-to-use but high-performance project-management tool Both of these concepts became key aspects of our project management planning.
Last Friday, the Project Management team, Nancy Friedland and myself, met with Alex Gil (who will be floating advisor to all teams) to develop our Project Management schema for the Morningside Heights Web Site. The result of our meeting was a spreadsheet in Google Docs listing tasks for each team, each task followed by a row of deadline date options. The tasks listed were those that would need to be completed in order for our site to launch on its planned initial launch date of December 2014.
The spreadsheet also specifies that, parallel with the overarching tasks assigned to the teams, each individual needs to be completing research, gathering items, and planning exhibits for his/her specific chosen building.
At today’s meeting, the Project Management spreadsheet was shared with the group. An open discussion was held about the tasks proposed for each team and each team was allowed to determine its own time frame for the completion of each task. The discussion was extremely helpful insofar as it enabled us to achieve some clarity on how tasks are interrelated and where tasks involve one team working with the assistance of another. For example, the design team will be making layout choices, regarding aspects such as logo, header, and footer; but the development team is responsible for implementing those layout choices. The research group is responsible for establishing metadata standards; but the individuals working on specific buildings should also keep the research group updated with a list of buildings, persons, and entities that will be made reference to in their branch of the project.
Choices and decisions made by teams regarding the various aspects of the site will be submitted to the group as a whole for feedback.
It was agreed that as one aspect of task completion each team would be responsible to post to this public blog about some aspect[s] of the process of completing the task.
All in all, today’s meeting was very productive and energizing for the group as a whole.
