Process & Project Mgt

• Please add the URL(s) of your process / project management platform(s) to this shared google doc.

• Please note that they may be one and the same.

Create More Than You Consume

You should have a dedicated project management platform to document your daily and/or weekly progress/process for your gathering. This can be as simple as a Google Drive with corresponding files or a project management platform i.e. Notion or an analog planner.

Students are expected to share their progress with others using their project management platform.

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year. ~Ray Bradbury, "The Art of Fiction No. 203." Interviewed by Sam Weller.

Why document your process?

Documentation of your process is an integral part of any gathering; it records the many steps in the creation of a work. This is important because process documentation:

• allows you to review and reflect on the iterative journey of your ideas and their physical manifestations over time

• can often be the catalyst for future gatherings that derive from some unexplored thread in the original idea

• captures previous points in the life of a gathering that you may need to go back to if the chosen direction does not prove successful

• provides ample material with which to communicate to a public audience the narrative of your work, the evolution of your ideas, and the morphology of materials and forms

With this in mind, throughout the duration of the semester each student must carefully document all of the work created in this class, from brainstorming sessions with post-it notes to pages in a sketchbook to rough prototypes. You will post this documentation on your process website on a daily or weekly basis.

What should you document?

• Daily/Weekly/Monthly Progress & Process (AKA what have you done today or this week?)

  • At least 1 post per week DUE at noon on Fridays. If it is not posted by noon, you will not receive credit.

  • The majority of the posts should be your own writing (well-composed and proofread for impeccable spelling and grammar).

  • Accountability partner meeting notes

  • pdfs of any presentations (annotated)

  • notes taken about your gathering or presentations by you or your accountability partner

  • Milestones / Tasks that have been completed

  • Include who or what was involved.

  • Include images, illustrations, audio, video, snippets of research, ANNOTATED links, etc. relevant to your thesis.

  • If you do not do anything for the week, write I did not work on my gathering this week.

• An About Area (about your gathering)

  • Your “elevator pitch” or description for your gathering.

  • Date and location

  • A visual of your project (optional); it can be a sketch, illustration, image, video, etc.

• Sourced & Annotated Research / Reference / Inspiration (Google Drive, Workflowy or Notion are great for this!)

  • Sourced means where did you get this from? if it is a website, provide a link. If it is a book, provide a bibliography. If it is an image, where did you get it from? If it is a quote, who said it or who did you poll or interview?

  • Annotated means with notes. You don’t have to write a novel. 1 to 2 thoughtful, contextual sentences is more than enough. So, “This was inspirational” would not be a good note as it provides no context. However, “This book discusses how nostalgia is a useless emotion because nostalgia is based on the past. This point of view is antithetical to my project because I’m trying to demonstrate how the sentimentality of nostalgia is valuable to the human experience.” is a viable note.)

Project Scope: MoSCoW Method

Project Management

Recommended Digital and Analog Project Mgt. Tools

I recommend having an analog and / or digital personal kanban. I personally use a combination of both!

Digital Platforms

I recommend all of the following, which have FREE versions. There are so many more to choose from.

• Airtable
• Asana
• Google Docs/Google Sheets/Google Folders (for media–audio, photos, and videos)

• Miro
• Notion
• Trello
• Workflowy is one of my personal favorite (2 min getting started YouTube video)

Analog methods

Post-it notes on a wall or mini ones in a notebook (so you can move them around).

The most highly recommended planner or journal by students is the Bullet Journal. It's a system. You only need to use a pen and paper or a digital tablet to engage. In other words, there's no journal to buy.

Vertical Notecards with a stand (for example)

Planners

Track Your Actionable Tasks and Progress (AKA Project Management)

You need to create a system to track your actionable tasks and progress (aka making sure you are getting your project tasks done).

Break down EVERYTHING you need to do for your project into actionable tasks. All actionable tasks should start with a verb (i.e. write, call, email, build, collect, etc.) and be visible in some way (not in your head).

You should make your actionable tasks VISIBLE in a calendar and/or planner or journal. (See suggestions below).

I suggest using Personal Kanban as a system, but you may have your own. The 3 to 4 columns I recommend for Personal Kanban (but you are not limited to) are:

• To-Do

• Today (Work-In-Progress (WIP) limit of 3 to 5 maximum)

• Waiting For (OPTIONAL)

• Done (This Week)

An Overview of Some Tools and an in-depth Asana Tutorial

Asana Overview