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April 17, 2005
Project Plan Completed (lablog4-17-05)
So we have “released” our first contribution to the DIY humanoid robot KIT. Don’t get too excited here folks, it’s just our project plan and planning tools: a gantt chart, a work breakdown structure (WBS), an org chart and our statement of work (SOW).
A gantt chart is just a project schedule organized by task and graphically illustrated over time. Our gantt chart was made in Microsoft Project. Project can be painful to use. If I get the chance to do it again using a better piece of software I’ll put that up in a revision. You can make one in excel or photoshop or with a crayon, but make a gantt chart so you have something to guide you step by step during the ritual chaos of your project. It will be particularly important when you are in the thickest weeds of fabrication and integration and unable to think anymore and just want to be told golem-like what to do next. This is true of most documentation like wiring diagrams and software flow-charts: they make it easier for tired minds to accomplish the higher project goals.
The WBS is a tool that allows you to break a project down from its high-level product and processes to its lowest level tasks. Historically, the WBS was adopted by the DoD, and it is described in Military Standard (MIL-STD) 881B as: " a product-oriented family tree composed of hardware, software, services, data and facilities .... [it] displays and defines the product(s) to be developed and/or produced and relates the elements of work to be accomplished to each other and to the end product(s)." So there you go. I learned about them through my work with NASA and I think they are extremely useful as a tool, logic game and pillow talk. You basically break your project down into the product you hope to make and the processes you need to make it. So if we were making a pencil the product, or product breakdown structure (PBS), is lead, a wood hexagonal body painted yellow and an eraser. Each of these product elements will need a number of tasks to make them happen, design, fab, etcetera. In addition to all this, in order to crank out this improbable pencil, we will need someone to manage the whole damn pencil project, the integration of all these pencil parts we will have and someone to test the hell out of this pencil. So we have six level one WBS nodes: lead, wood body, eraser, project management, integration and testing. You can expand it to pencil marketing and distribution too if you’d like. I won’t. Each one of these six nodes gets broken down until you get to a resolution where the individual project tasks start to emerge. Below is a partially completed example of our pencil enterprise in WBS form:
Even at this resolution and degree of finish you can already discern a few clear low-level tasks, like creating the projet plan, periodic schedule traking and eraser integration.
This Page has more about the WBS if you are interested in being a civil servant:
http://www.hyperthot.com/pm_wbs.htm
An organization chart is just a graphic that illustrates your team hierarchy, who will support who to get the work done. If you have a big crew helping you and a complicated project, it’s essential you have an idea of how you organization is structured. For me and Michelle, we basically have to fill every project role we can, asking some engineer/artist friends for some specific help here and there and making sure to have a network of informal consultants, advisors and references. So our chart is more useful as an indicator of where we need to make a new friend who knows how to cast in silicon or take a class at the complete sculptor.
And finally the SOW is just the act of putting exactly what you intend to make in writing. Not every nut and bolt but just the high-level goals. With our pencil project the SOW would be simply to make a pencil. It seems stupid to suggest that but you would be surprised how often people have no idea of the scope of what they intend to create or at least don’t communicate this to their team members.
In part, all of this is to ensure that seventy-five years from now, if our little animatronic life story is lucky enough to be in storage in some art warehouse in Jersey as part of someone’s permanent collection, I hope it has been documented well-enough to be repaired, improved and re-installed without any assistance from the happily dead artists.
Now we can begin working on requirements analysis and specifically the humanoid arm.
Project Management Kit Zipped folder
Posted by michelle at April 17, 2005 05:10 PM
