Refinements to UX planning

[Colin Clark]

UX Coordinators,

It's been quite a learning experience over the past couple of months  
to figure out the simplest and most effective planning process for the  
team. Our overriding goal is to keep the planning simple and  
manageable: we want to stay focussed on our project priorities, and we  
don't want to spend all of our time in meetings.

To this end, I've been working with Daphne and others to refine the  
process a bit. We've introduced a new spreadsheet to help track  
individual work assignments, ensuring that we spread the work fairly  
across the whole team. We're also estimating and tracking release  
plans with greater detail so that we don't lose sight of our ultimate  
goal: to release great user interface components for the open source  
community.

Here are more details:

http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/How+We+Plan

Since we don't yet have a dedicated project manager, we all have to  
pitch in to help with the planning process.   In the meantime, Oliver  
and I will be around to help prepare the release and iteration plans.

Here's the current break-down of the UX tasks for the upcoming Fluid  
0.3 release, scheduled for April 25, 2008:

http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Fluid+0.3+UX+Release+Plan

Here's an example of the project tracking spreadsheet that we will be  
using for future iteration plans:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=py52-xhVHH6eUo3OYa9ZAJw

I welcome your comments, criticisms, and suggestions.

Colin

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Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
http://fluidproject.org