Organization is key to creating, working on, and completing any project especially in our field of User experience and HCI. Projects can’t be completed in a timely manner without project management, and that’s where project management software like asana is beneficial for anyone who needs to ensure every detail of the day, week, month are noted or jotted down somewhere. Project development software helps break down projects into daily tasks and allows for you to not feel overwhelmed when working on a large project. You can set all the parameters of a project and customize the workflow allowing for greater flexibility for you as the user.
Project management is important for several reasons. While most have to do with you as a designer and worker, some have more to do with workflow, and keeping the overall project moving with all its wheels turning simultaneously. “Great project management means much more than keeping project management’s iron triangle in check, delivering on time, budget, and scope; it unites clients and teams, creates a vision for success and gets everyone on the same page of what’s needed to stay on track for success. When projects are managed properly, there’s a positive impact that reverberates beyond delivery of ‘the stuff’”. (Benaston) Keeping yourself on track as well as transparency so that managers and product owners can stay on track allows for the project to be worked on as a whole, together.
Project management puts the worker hierarchy to use when it comes to who does what, and how the project continues to develop over time. As for the client and upper management side of things, it helps create dates for deliverables, and the completion of a project. They ensure that every part of the project is up to specifications and meets a certain level of quality. “Quality control activities are used to assess whether the product or service meets the quality requirements specified in a project. They are: Validating project deliverables, meeting stakeholder’s requirements, identifying reasons for poor product quality, taking action to eliminate quality-related problems” (Arvind Rongala)
For this week’s assignment, I used Asana, a web-based project management software, to create a project management calendar that details every week and assignment for this course. Having all the course details and due dates on there will help me better make use of my available time before it gets late and have to crunch to get the work completed. I listed out all weekly modules and their perspective assignments. “Asana was created in 2008 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and software engineer Justin Rosenstein after they saw a need to coordinate teams more effectively inside the social network’s operations. They soon realized that tech giants weren’t the only companies that could benefit from greater efficiency”. (Matthew Finnegan)
Project management has been shown to improve workflow across different departments and teams working on different aspects of the same project as well as different industries where large teams are assigned to the same project or group of projects. It is an essential part of modern teamwork and should be used in order to not only complete a project, but to ensure quality control throughout its development, to keep costs down, to analysis where improvement can be made, and to set a timeline.
Sources
Benaston. “Why Is Project Management Important?” The Digital Project Manager, 28 Nov. 2019, thedigitalprojectmanager.com/why-is-project-management-important/.
Rongala, Arvind. “The Importance of Project Management.” Invensis Learning Blog, 17 Jan. 2020, www.invensislearning.com/blog/importance-of-project-management/#How_to_Create_a_Realistic_Timeline.
Finnegan, Matthew. “What Is Asana? Task Management Tracking Made Easy.” Computerworld, Computerworld, 2 Nov. 2017, http://www.computerworld.com/article/3235710/what-is-asana-task-management-tracking-made-easy.html.
Design By Angel Vazquez 