Due to the amount of project related work I’ll have this year (T307 has a significant project component and M450 is a project course) I thought I’d try and take a more organised approach to project management, keeping track of ideas and information etc – normally I’ve done this either by keeping lots of stuff in state in my head (usually) or scribbling notes on paper.
The first TMA for M450 is to outline the project topic (including the usual ‘problem definition’ bit such as: what is the problem? why is it a problem? what is the suggested approach to the solution? etc), discuss any practical work carried out so far and a couple of other bits. The blurb for the TMA has a certain structure it’s ‘recommended’ for this to be laid out in which means a bit of step-by-step and lists of information to compile etc so I guess by ‘recommended’ it means that’s the format it should be in, pretty much.
For Linux I’ve discovered the View Your Mind software for creating mind maps (or as I’ve always known them ‘spider diagrams’ but apparently most people don’t know this terminology?!) which is also available through the Ubuntu repositories and probably those of other distributions as well.
I’ve actually found it most useful to come up with a ‘rough’ mind map on paper as and when I think of it – which is usually on a train or something similar – and put the mind map into the laptop later. As I think trying to structure information (and mind maps do have structure and hierarchy of course, even though they aren’t a sequential list) too early on is counter productive and very likely to miss connections between ideas because structure was imposed on it too soon. Generally I will throw out ideas in “any” order onto a sheet of paper and then organise them later and this is the way I’ve been using the mind map software.
The first mind map is for the parts I’ll need to work out for the TMA (obviously I haven’t included any detail here such as actual wording from the TMA, specifics of problem or implementation, etc!). I represented it with the “core” M450 TMA 01 on the right and the hierarchy structure leading up to it from the left as it is meant to be that all of the sub-sub-topics etc need detailing first before they make up each group and the groups make up the TMA. Mind maps for actual ideas for the project (e.g. functionality/requirements for the user interface) would look quite different to this.
Ultimately though the limitation I’ve found with most of the mind map methods is that they do have this strict hierarchy (e.g. topics 1, 2 and 3 relate to the central topic, and 1a/1b/1c come from topic 1.. etc) and don’t allow for linking between ‘nodes’ that aren’t part of the same subtree very easily. I don’t think mind maps/spider diagrams will ever become my real thought process for brainstorming ideas or working through things in a structured way but are at least a useful way to represent ‘exploratory’ information in the TMAs and eventual project report! The emphasis seems strongly on process and method as much as the actual results, with a lot of reflective practice and ‘what parts did you find easy/hard’ etc. The project for T211 was a bit like this with a design log having to be submitted and a lot of writing about the process we went through (some of which I suspect was ‘reconstructed’ after the event for a lot of people..) so the process is not new to me but I still find the reflective practice bit quite difficult as steps that I go through intuitively or naturally need to be made explicit and detailed out step by step!
