Weeknote: Revision-tracking
Weeknote #3 (English*)
*Pwede mong basahin, nang naka-translate sa Tagalog-Taglish, dito.
A footnote to the user story…story.
We realized the intense need for revision logs. Particularly, when you don’t have an official project manager.
We were quite pampered in our former workplaces where teams had assigned project managers, tracking features, coordinating QA and keeping everyone aligned to the timelines.
In light* project teams, you don’t normally have a “project manager” and it boils down to the team’s discipline and process to manage what goes into the product.
*By “light”, I mean — you have a skeleton team of someone in charge of tech and code then someone in charge of design, then other people in charge of things like copy, operations and strategy.
Documentation, documentation, documentation.
Documentation is like exercise — it’s tiring, only a particular type of person is passionate about it, and you don’t normally do it unless
a) you need to because the situation is already really bad, or
b) it’ll make you look good.
This just goes to show that for any team that tracks or documents its project progress — the feature list, pattern lab or style guide needs to be visible, approachable, cross-discipline and part of your workflow.
Not exactly about revision-tracking, but a great overview how documentation helps global teams, through actual examples.
What we know about work, we owe — not only to our formal education and our jobs, but also to the forward-thinking designers, developers, researchers, product managers and teams who choose to share their processes and lessons (for free) on Youtube, blogs, websites and MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) tutorials. This is the spirit of designing in the open. Where design teams show their process and what they learn along the way. This is done to grow the knowledge base of the industry, and also to get feedback and dialogue going about the work.
(If you’re interested in reading more about the beauty of open design, you can read this.)
We share what we experience in these weeknotes. To respect our clients’ confidentiality, we won’t directly post details about them. Everything we share here are the opinions (and life lessons) of the writer.
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