ITP Lab: Planning and Completing a Project

Planning and Completing a Project
Kimon Keramidas & Michael Mandiberg

Start with an overview (5m)
Project Management begins with conceiving of realizable and relevant projects
Project Management requires time management, and team communication
Your goal for this sessions is for you to recognize the importance of planning and forethought in executing a complex project

KK & MM share some anecdotes (20m and 10m for Q&A)
Projects: Smithsonian & Chaplin/A+F
Themes:
You need to find your own path, but you need to be actively looking for that path.
Scope creep – how do you measure what is scope creep?
How to you build in time to make mistakes?
How do you enable experimentation?
When and how to you reach out to others for help/knowledge/resources?
How to understand the scope of tools you are unfamiliar with?
You need to understand your field so you know how to act in that field, and what constitutes new knowledge.
How does traditional research transition into project based work?

Breakout (20m)
Pair and describe their goal – project/general interest/direction – write it down
Describe a potential project – write it down
Make a list of what they need to accomplish the project – people, skills, knowledge resources, stuff, access
Identify which ITP labs meet these needs
Draft a rough sequential timeline (what comes first, second, third). Focus on order, not necessarily duration.

KK & MM workshop a few of them. (20-30m)

KK & MM Talk about how we deal with time management & team communication (20m)
How we allocate time and resources.
Share 7×24 grid as *one* way of managing time.
You have to know yourself. There are many ways of dealing with time. You need to be honest with yourself and find the one that is going to work for you.
K – stays ahead of inbox, likes meetings with people
MM – all creative work on Tuesday, Trello, talking things through, the shower/bicycle/massage
Dealing with other people: You need to understand their personalities. Often you will be leveraging access to resources through someone else, so get into their good graces. How do you negotiate all the people.
Remember, a dissertation is a project you are managing, with a team, and a workflow.

Consider your data, and its afterlives. This is a Data checklist from the Library.

Review the list of workshops this fall and Sign up for Labs!

Pair and then report back (15m)

Q&A for remaining time.

 

Here is a cleaner public version of this document on Kimon’s site