This week in the project requires our team to form a design document. The design document will act as an outline for the rest of the project. For me personally, this assignment is amazingly helpful. I love having an outline to follow as it makes everything more straight forward and also provides a set of rough checkpoints that can mark progress. Since the document will be an outline, the checkpoints will not have any specific meaning as far as completing the project goes, but it will help to move the team in the right direction. The design document is something that may be updated or changed as time goes on and the specifics are likely change, but it is still good to have a written plan for the course of the project. We did run into a slight problem this week with working on the design document. One of the team members currently lives in China so there is a large time difference that we work around. We have been able to work around that so far and we have kept in touch on a regular basis, but he started work this week. With a work schedule of the typical 9am to 5pm, he will be unavailable during weekdays as that correlates to 5pm to 1am PST. We usually held group calls on weekdays so we will have to try and find a time that will work on weekends for conferences. Other than that snag, the project has been great so far and the team has good people on it so I am not too worried about this difficulty. There was a sample design document given to us and Gantt charts were used to chart their timeline for the project for the upcoming terms. We will adapt similar charts to those since that is likely the timeline that will be used for this project. It is helpful that those timeline charts were supplied to us since it was able to give me an idea on what needs to be worked on when and it will help me formulate my schedule for future weeks.
