Project Management
The Project Management page covers the Project Noah team, our Agile approach, project milestones, and management tools used.
Stephan Gabler, Technical Architect and primary project leader who was accountable for the product development, delivery, and final submission.
Mehdi Jamei, Delivery Manager.
Brian Lewis, Interaction Designer / User Researcher / Usability Tester.
Guillaume Chaslot, Backend Web Developer.
Kirtan Upadhyaya, Product Manager.
Pascal Corpet, Backend Web Developer.
The Bayes Impact team implemented week long sprints following Scrum to rapidly iterate and test product mockups. We ran three, 1-week long sprints, starting with Sprint 0 (defined below). Stephan Gabler was the Scrum Master who managed daily standups, backlog grooming, and sprint planning sessions.
-
Project Kickoff - We first assembled our development team and reviewed the requirements of the RFI. We established an initial product idea, created an initial architecture, and set rules for development best practices.
-
Discovery Sprint 0 - We spent the first week going through data and understanding the information available. We structured scoping sessions with the team to determine an initial product direction. This consisted of the design team developing early mockups and the engineering team determining minimum product requirements.
-
Minimum viable products (MVP) - Our first milestone was to develop a MVP as a basis for collecting frequent user feedback and limiting unnecessary product features. We developed a product backlog that defined all of the product features we wanted to implement, divided tasks by the roles of each team member, and started to assign tickets. The MVP represents the quickest path to a functioning product, this defined our most important tickets (essential to functionality) and least important tickets (extra features outside of the core product).
-
User stories - For different users (e.g. explorers, vacationers, city administrators) we established narrative goals that emphasize the perspectives and needs of the users.
-
Daily Standups - We started each morning with a brief 15-minute meeting where each member of the team would discuss what they accomplished the day before, what they planned to accomplish on the current day, their goal for the sprint, and any blockers they may be experiencing.
-
Sprint Review and Planning - At the end of our sprints, we would go demo the current state of the MVP with input of latest user feedback from the design team, sort open items by either adding them to the next sprint or discarding them if they are not a priority, and determine priority items for the following sprint.
We split the project up into three parallel pipelines: Data processing, front-end development, and user interface & user experience. The project milestones cover a 14-day period of two agile sprint cycles.
We used many project management tools to collaborate on Project Noah:
-
Slack- Primary communication tool for the project collaborators.
-
Trello- Trello functions as a collaboration management tool to manage product backlog, track ticket progression, flag bugs and fixes, and to divide tasks between the team.
-
Google Drive- Our main method to transfer and store files, collaborate on documents and presentations, and manage our team folder.
-
Balsamic- A low fidelity design mockup tool that allows clickable demos for user research and for defining product requirements.