Project Planning and Management

 

Introduction

Project planning and management is a major part of any research or software project. As discussed previously, I will be using a Kanban board for day to day project tracking, however in this post I'm going to discuss how I aim to perform project planning and management.

Planning and Management

Typically when planning a software project, there is a product owner or client that is requesting something be researched or developed. For my research project, I will be taking on the role of the client as well as that of the developer and researcher.

To be able to populate a Kanban board, I need to be able to split the research down into multiple small tasks that can be worked on individually. My research project can be though of as being in 4 phases:

1. Planning
2. Obtaining Data
3. Analysing Data
4. Development of Prototype software

Although this may seem like a waterfall approach where tasks are well defined up front and then worked on in a sequential order, I still will be considering an agile approach to the research project's lifecycle.

To ensure that I am on target, the end of each of these phases will mark a milestone where I can monitor project progress and adjust the plan if I need to.

In the planning phase, I will set out all of the pieces of work that I need to do and assign a time estimate to each task. I will then be in a situation where I can start populating the Kanban board with the tasks that I know need to be done, linking each together to provide me with a timeline for project progress. The outcome of the planning phase will be a populated Kanban board with milestones and time estimates of how long each aspect of the research project will take.

In the second phase, I will initially be creating a list of recipes to scrape that fulfill my project criteria. I will then obtain results by web scraping this list of recipe web sites to see which techniques and tools are most appropriate. Since I plan to look at recipes from multiple sources, I expect to add more milestones to the project plan - one for each source of recipes. This will allow me to keep monitoring progress. The output of this phase will be a set of results obtained from scraping the websites that I have specified.

The third phase will be analysing the results that I have obtained from the second phase, with the outcome of the stage being the recommended optimal tools and techniques for obtaining allergen information from the source web sites.

Finally, in the forth phase, I will develop a prototype system using the data and results obtained from the previous two stages. I aim to run this phase like an agile software product rather than in a waterfall process, albeit I will have self imposed deadlines of what needs to be done and by when. I will periodically go through the list of tasks that I need to complete and ensure I have all the correct data to proceed.  I will then perform development and testing together rather than all development up front and all testing at the end. The outcome of the forth stage will be a software prototype and associated documentation, including test plans and test results.

There are several deliverables that I expect to include as part of my research project, including the prototype software and research data described above.  I will also be producing research documentation and info-graphics on the processes and techniques I have used. These will be completed in parallel with the 4 phases such that all deliverables will be available at the end of phase 4.

Credits

Photo by Scott Blake on Unsplash