Project Management for Summer Research

I tend to take on more projects during the summer than is reasonable. This summer I had a research team of nine (1 high school student, 1 high school teacher, and 7 undergrads). In total, we worked on 7 projects! If this situation sounds familiar to you — I have a tip for you!

This is inspired by agile techniques in software engineering, but the key thing here is to help researchers take big tasks and break them up into concrete, bit-sized tasks.

I made a poster for each of the projects. Here’s the idea:

Parking Lot — Big tasks like “write a paper” or “learn R” that can generate lots and lots of little tasks! Each of these big tasks is written on a post-it note.

Ready — Bit sized tasks that you could conceivably start and in about an hour finish. These can’t be things like “research [X]” — it has to be something that can actually eventually be considered done. Each task is written on a post-it note and can get moved to one of the later stages.

Tmrw/Today — For each of the team members there are columns for Tomorrow and Today. Each of the 8 boxes fits a post-it.

This poster is the one for our “BlueJ/Java” project, which analyzes Java files students have written in the BlueJ environment collected by the “Black box” project at the University of Kent.

You can see these in action in the images below. Carolina (a high school student in Upward Bound) worked on analyzing the CSTeachingTips.org twitter data, Emily (a Mudder) worked on a project focused on Scratch, and Emily and Eleanor (another Mudder) worked on a project focused on integrating social justice topics into introductory CS homework assignments.

I loved this because it was:

Concrete: Distinguishing between the never ending tasks in the “Parking Lot” and the one-hour tasks in the “Ready” section meant that the team was only working on concrete tasks! (We might spend an hour and figure out another ten, hour-long tasks that the task would actually require — but that’s fine!)

Celebratory: My teams worked REALLY hard this summer and did great work! If we only kept a to-do list we wouldn’t be able to see all of the hard work that had happened! The overflowing “Done” section was a constant reminder!

Visible: It was always easy to see what my teams were working on. (Sorry — were you hoping this would start with a third “C”?)