Production timeline

Some strategies for making a production timeline:

• First, identify and inventory work you’ve already done.
• Identify components. What are the parts of your project? One way to think about this is: if you were hiring other people to do parts of your project, which chunks could you break off and hand to another person?
• Identify milestones. One obvious milestone for Capstone is turning your project in on the due date. Are there other “stopping points” that you can aim for? Examples of this might include:
  • Completed character designs
  • Working hardware prototype
  • Completed UX wireframes/mockup
  • Initial round of user testing complete
  • etc.
• Identify phases. Can your project be divided roughly into groups of tasks that need to be done before tasks from other groups? Are there certain milestones that occur at the borders between these phases? (e.g., Often projects will have a pre-production phase, a production phase and a post-production/testing/release phase.) Assign dates to each phase.
  • If your project has dependencies between milestones that can’t be neatly divided into phases, consider using a Gantt chart (or something similar) to visualize and track those dependencies.
• For each combination of component and phase/milestone, make a list of tasks. What actually has to be done to complete the phase/milestone? Assign each task an hourly estimate.
  • Be honest about your hourly estimates! My rule of thumb: imagine the number of hours it’ll take you, and then multiply that number by three.
  • For tasks that require more than your own labor (e.g., anything that has to do with ordering physical things, travel, scheduling something on the calendar), make sure to include an estimate of calendar time, not just labor time
  • This is a good moment to check in with yourself. Add up the hours of work you’ve estimated. Is it less than or equal to the amount of hours you have available on the calendar? If it’s more, then you might want to consider some parts of your project!
  • Consider assigning due dates to each task, or scheduling those tasks on your calendar.
• Your project plan consists of the list you’ve just made of phases, milestones, tasks, hourly estimates and due dates.
• The format for this is free-form. It can be a spreadsheet or a to-do list or a GitHub Issues site. However you want to do it. I just want to see that you have a plan for how to get your work done.
• We’ll work through an example of this in class.