RTE Player Redesign: Blog Two
Project Plan
An Agile Management Structure involves establishing a problem to solve, and then moving quickly between stages with constant revision and iteration. Our Gantt chart below provides evidence of this flexible workflow, which is why some sections overlap- we were constantly iterating, improving and building on what we knew using design thinking. It helped us keep a broader, longer term vision. The weekly homework assignments broke down our work into shorter tasks to complete, and regular meetings kept us on target.
Timeline & Tasks
As the chart illustrates, we moved from empathising with our users through research, defining our problem, ideation and prototyping, and testing our results. These were not rigid, and we swiftly moved between sections at different points. We met virtually every three days or so depending on the stage of the project, with individual tasks to complete divided up at the end of each session. We achieved a lot working this way, but presenting our work became time-consuming. To avoid work doubling up and improve efficiency, we started to work together in live online sessions (especially by the prototyping phase). Workloads were equal, opinions could quickly be given and collaboration was just easier in these virtual work sessions. We organised meetings and offline discussions in the Teams chat, which was constantly on. We had discussed using a Kanban system to keep an overview of progress, but we always had a good sense of what work progress by keeping screenshots of deliverables beside our workspaces.
Roles & Responsibilities
Our team charter in the first week established Michael as our team lead, who ensured our meetings were specific and results driven. The rest of the team structure was organic, with equal responsibilities and high levels of collaboration, particularly in the ideation and prototyping stages. We used a Triangulation research approach to cross check each others work, which strengthened the output of our research phase and prototyping in particular.
Collaboratively we worked together to figure out major decisions, like problem identification, our personas (after each creating our own), organising key findings from both research and usability testing, customer journey mapping, and our user scenarios, among other decisions.
We had a responsibility to one another to show up to meetings with enough progress made so meetings could be productive when we collaborated. That was enough push to keep us on track as we moved through the project. Miro also gave each member notifications when a board was edited, so this acted as motivation to keep things moving (a unique quirk to online learning!).
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