Reflection: GitHub Project Board
Last week you and your team created over 50 tasks and placed them on the GitHub Project Board. After reviewing the tasks, please take some time to reflect on the following questions:
- Which tasks seem like they’ll take more time than others?
- There a lot of moving parts here. How will your team sync on the progress of each task?
- What blind spots - i.e. areas of expertise - are some of these tasks exposing? How do you plan on addressing those blind spots?
Motivation
Timing tasks
These questions come from leading technical projects, both large and small. Identifying “blockers” - a term used to identify tasks that require a dependency/skill set/general assistance - ahead of time is useful for timing the execution of any given task.
When one zooms out, knowing that task X will take you 10x as long as tasks Y and Z will help you prioritize.
Syncing as a team
There has not been one group that has successfully relied on the heroics of one group member to complete the final project. This final project demands collaboration.
This is where declaring formal space for conversation as a team - be it through weekly Zoom calls, end of week check-ins over Slack, or some other mechanism are helpful. These groups projects live and die by communication: no news is not good news when it comes to projects that are dependent on a group of people to independently accomplish tasks.
Blind spots
Identifying blind spots is critical for your growth as a program evaluation manager/researcher/data analyst/data scientist. At all times, you need to be aware of what skills you are confident in and which are areas for growth.
I challenge each of you to review the tasks and start to think which tasks you yourself could accomplish and which you would need support on. The support can come from many places: office hours with me, working on something with a team member, or setting up independent study time to review a concept (i.e. writing functions in R).
The faster you are at catching what you don’t know, the faster you become at creating action plans to learn that which you don’t know.