The need for structure
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The group dynamic in Team Valravn is rather complicated. While we, on paper, have all the “expertise areas” covered, we are not able to utilize our roles very well. One core issue I feel is that our project manager have not had much time to dedicate to the group. We did not think that it would be an issue, but I think that the lack of proper management staff has become a real issue now. The group is most of the time not very focused, and things are not getting done at a reasonable pace. I have been trying to combine my designer role with a managerial role, but with the programming going slowly I have also been helping out with that. I think that by not focusing on holding the vision and making sure it is clear, it has become rather blurry and a bit unstable. Right now it feels like every few sentence between group members is ‘How exactly should this work and why?’, and being a design student hearing that does not feel great. One problem I have managed to solve is that our backlog has not been all that useful. The tasks have been too big, especially the programming ones. One day I realized that what we need is a proper “task list”. I started writing one and was able to write down at least 10 without stopping. Then after thinking a bit, around 10 more. 
Picture of a part of the tasklist. Excuse the bad English, these tasks are often quite hastily written! I made the list in Google Docs (although I will probably move it to Google Sheets soon). The task list is now around 40 items, with around half of them either completed or in progress. I chose to mark the status with colors so that it would be easy to get a quick overview of the task statuses: A status in red means “not started”, a status in orange means “doing”, a yellow one means “needs a bit of tweaking” and finally a green one means “complete”. A bonus with the coloring is that it has made marking tasks “complete” feel rather satisfying! An important part of the task list for me was to have a Purpose-column. While I do believe that solely having tasks listed is helpful, having that column serves the purpose of arguing the design, and also a reminder of why exactly a task needs doing.  |
