Overview

Our finalised schedule, made in Excel, was created by Nathaniel after discussion on the key dates and timeline with the rest of the team. Our team will use it to outline overarching tasks rather than tracking progress, as we use our Trello to track team progress instead.

Technical Description / Explanation 

Our gantt chart outlines the key dates and task that will happen in each stage and sub-stage of development. Green indicates that the task has been completed to a satisfactory degree, yellow indicates that the task is currently being worked on, and red indicates that a task has not been started yet.

To create our chart, we landed on using excel rather than alternatives like Jira despite their integrations with other apps we have been using such as Trello. We chose this because of our familiarity with Excel over Jira. Our team will be using the AGILE framework to ensure that work is completed in a timely manner, with each stage and sub-stage of production (pre-production, alpha, beta, gold standard, post-production) being its own sprint. Having each stage be a sprint neatly compartmentalises the work we need to complete throughout synoptic. We will primarily use our schedule to track what has or hasn't been done so far (in conjunction with our Trello).

Gantt Chart Link

Reflection

In my opinion, I think our gantt chart could use some revision and improvement. For example, it could be formatted better to utilise more horizontal space over vertical space. Additionally, if we made a Jira website and created our schedule on there, it could better integrate with our Trello board (as both are Atlassian apps and have integrations with one-another). Aside from that, I'm happy with how the schedule is divided and the colour coding is appreciated.

The main strenghts of our schedule is that it's fairly simple and as such easy to interpret. In a similar vein, this is also its biggest weakness. I believe the biggest improvement to be made is to add more information (such as who is working on what task), but this issue is solved by using our Trello as part of our schedule as well, as tasks on the Trello are assigned to members of the team. I think our schedule will mostly stay the same, with minor task swaps between Alpha and Beta as they're the two busiest periods of production.