PRODUCTION: Production in A Pandemic

Switching to SCRUM.

In this final module we took a different approach to the production of our team, whereas before we had been using the Master Schedule our producer created at the beginning of the first module to structure our tasks.

At this point in the course we were behind schedule, so it seemed highly unlikely that we would be able to achieve everything that we wanted to at the start of the course. To use that same schedule, we would need to completely redo it, which was something we didn’t have time, due to higher priority tasks needing doing.

Therefore we decided to use a different approach. Since we had the foundations of the project done, most of what we were producing was receiving feedback every day.

A couple of months earlier - Tanguy, one of our helpful tutors, informed us about a production technique called SCRUM.

The general idea is that you produce a backlog of all the tasks that need to be done and then every week or day you would take a handful of these tasks with the highest priority and assign them to individuals.

It means that if people finish a task, they always have something to move on too. The outcome of SCRUM is that if you work like that till the deadline, you will either finish the project but if not at least you will have the highest priority tasks completed.

If I was to do this again though I would move it onto a cleaner interface. Excel was useful, because in this case everyone was happy to use it. But in the future when managing people that aren’t necessarily students, I would use something with more functions built in, such as Trello.

We tried to implement Trello into our workflow multiple times throughout the project. Unfortunately people weren’t willing to check it for notifications and didn’t find it accessible.