One of the first things after the euphoria of the success at siggraph to ebb, was the realization that we have a huge task a head of us. Developing a good project plan as we did for the preview is the first thing we needed to do. In our first team discussion after Siggraph 2009, the planning was the biggest part of our discussion. It was preceeded briefly by a short kudo’s & thank you’s going around the team. The goal is to come up with a high level initial project plan similar to the one that was created for the “Preview”. This is give us a guidance on how to finish the project.
During the start of the project it is more of a brain dump and rough cut phase. We needed a tool to easily do this. So our choice was to use Open Office Calc program to create an excel template that will be easy to modify and edit. We did this for a number of reasons but here are a few important ones …
- Easy for the project manager (usually not from the creative team) to maintain.
- Easy to alter
- Just a template not the actual project management tool (dotproject or planner) for that.
- Needs to feed into our One Page Project Manager Document assist in decision making
- Give us a rough guesstimate of steps, effort involved in the project
Project Plan Initial Template
We will include the standard template and instructions on how to create them on http://blog.animux.org/ shortly. No project should start without a plan. Hence we are doing it and want animators to know this is a necessary step on each and every project that involves teams or is spanned out for a few months.
We will also try to test out some PMI methodologies and templates which I think will help us come up modifications that will fit the animation industry.
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