Managing an OSE Project
Outline
The following topics need to be covered here from a management perspective:
- Starting an OSE Project
- Project Manager Responsibilities
- Project Roles
- Dealing with Volunteers
- Recruiting People
- Keeping people on task and focused
- Disruptive or Harmful Behaviors
- Time management - yours and theirs
- Communication
- Status - what pages need to be updated? GVCS Tools Status
- Promotion - blogging, etc.
- Use of Forums
- Marketing
- Describing project needs - Project Needs
- Managing the Project
- The OSE Project Life-Cycle
- Key Milestones
- Managing Tasks using Pivotal
- Development Strategy
- Systems Engineering Breakdown Diagrams
- OSE Specifications
- Documentation Standards
- Money Matters
- Raising Funds
- Keeping Track of Money
- Transparency
- Record Keeping
Overview and Context
Roles and Responsibilities
Dealing with Volunteers
- Recruitment - Crowdmap
Communication
Managing the Project
Recently, OSE has started to experiment with a project management application called Pivotal. This tools has been made available to OSE based on it's non-profit, open source status free of charge. The Pivotal Task Tracker allows tasks (stories) to be defined, tracked, and managed using agile development techniques. Our current goal is to import the development steps of the GVCS Development Template into Pivotal - as tasks that can be taken on by people. The Systems Engineering Breakdown Diagrams should break technologies down into components, so these can be turned into tasks. The key is to break down complex development paths into small chunks - as suggested in this important writing.
All of the OSE projects are public to view, but you must be a team member to enter new stories or work on a task. To see the public OSE projects link to [1] and search for "OSE".
The GVCS Tools Status is also something of a management tool since it rolls up much of the status and high level progress of the various projects. You can more or less see what projects are active and what is being worked on (provided this page is maintained).
Documentation Standards
Documentation standards to describe and track OSE projects are still under development. Only one product has gone through the full project life cycle - the CEB Press, and others have several prototypes - LifeTrac, Microtractor, Power Cube,Torch table - and are under development. Have a look at how these pages are organized to get a feel for how to set up OSE project pages. All GVCS projects should use the Product Template, which is illustrated on Torch Table Intro. At a minimum, each GVCS project should have the following pages:
- Intro
- Development process
- Bill of Materials
- Build Instructions
- Buy It!
- User's Manual
Note: Marcin would eliminate the Buy It until AFTER clarity is attained on: the OSE Label, OSE Specifications, Fabricator Training, Product Standards and Testing, License - and other fundamentals of Distributive Enterprise creation. We are setting new standards for distributive enterprise, and this should not be taken lightly.
This organization is being discussed at the current time (June 2011) and may be revised in the future.
The Wiki_Templates describes the only real standard we have for project documentation at this time by the core team back in January, 2011 (Marcin, Isaiah, Floyd in a face-to-face meeting). Other templates have been proposed independently of the core team since then, and much confusion has arisen as many people joined development efforts. Mark Norton has proposed expanding the tool template to include pages for an Overview, Research, Design, Development, Specifications, Bill of Materials, Build Instructions, How to Buy, and a User Manual. See Mark J Norton/GVCS Template for details but be aware that this is NOT an adopted OSE standard.
Other pages related to project documentation include: