Issue Driven Design Project Management

For the third round of the Solar Decathlon design, I was assigned to work in a team of four (Team 3) and to practice issue driven project management.  Issue driven project management describes a project management technique that is based on creating many small tasks (or issues) that require only a day or two to complete.  These tasks are divided equally among project members and the goal is to create a more comprehensive solution for the Solar Decathalon home management system.

In Google Project Hosting, issues are first created and then given both an owner and a status.

Generally, the progressions of issues are New > Accepted > Started > Done > Fixed.

Working in teams produced the best results because it allowed us to spend more time on each page since the workload for each individual person was lessened.  The first problem my team encountered was deciding on a standard template.  This issue blocked us for several days until we all agreed on the template.  From there, we incorporated all the feedback we were given into our third round of designs.  To ensure that requirements were met and consistency was maintained, I created a checklist that each page should adhere.

Although issue driven project management may have had a lot of overhead in the beginning (via meetings and time spent to standardize our designs), I think it was worth it because we were able to achieve a much higher level of quality in a shorter amount of time.  We always knew what we had to do and what other project members were doing, and thus, this made us more efficient in working together.