Project Management

Methodology

We have used a combination of the V-Model and Agile project management. We’ve found the the V-Model is great to keep track of longer term goals and milestones, and Agile is great for shorter term goals. We bridge the gap between these two methods by having weekly internal meetings where we look at our progress and ensure that we’re on track for the longer term.

Meeting Schedule

There are four types of meetings that occur during the week:

Daily Stand-ups – Every weekday for 15 minutes, each team member answers three questions:

  • What progress have you made?
  • What do you plan to do today?
  • Is anything blocking you?

We have found that this is extremely effective for managing communication and keeping each other accountable for the work that we promise.

Weekly Lab Meetings – Every week, we present our work to the “Agribot Team” which is a group of people working on the same project. This allows us to get feedback from people familiar with the project and stay in communication with them for future integration plans.

Weekly Sponsor Meetings – Every week, we present our work directly to our sponsor on a “1-on-1” meeting. This allows us to get direct feedback from our sponsor and communicate our week-to-week progress.

Weekly Team Meetings – Every week, we meet internally to discuss the following points

  • Risks and Issues
  • Upcoming Tasks
  • Daily Stand-up
  • Any other team-level relevant conversation

This allows us to delve deeper into any issues that we are not able to discuss in our stand-up meetings.

Software

We use Notion to manage our project. We have our project split up into seven pages:

  • Tasks – A list of our tasks and timeline updated on a daily basis.
  • Milestones – Larger scale milestones that we are working toward such as subsystem development and integration.
  • Risk Management – A list of our current risks and our history of mitigation.
  • Issues Tracker – A list of our current issues.
  • Meetings – Notes from all meetings internal and external.
  • Docs – Formal and informal notes describing system components .
  • Engineering Wiki – Formalized information on project specific information such as the Nitrate Sensor.