(Operations Portion, Subhash Gubba)
- Collect and Review Weekly Reports
- Ask questions and confirm information needed from HAAG Leadership
- Facilitate Demos and team cohesion
- Attend Bi-weekly team meetings
As I have primarily been observing and notating the dynamics and progress of the group, I am now shifting to a more active role where I suggest ways the team can improve their output and collaboration. My efficacy as a project manager can be measured by:
- The satisfaction each member has with my participation and suggestions.
- The satisfaction the comp advisor and faculty advisor have.
- If the progress is stagnating or advancing towards the team's goals.
The team members do work together in smaller groups of one or two here and there, but we need more cohesion. They have worked very well on their smaller goals and individual tasks thus far, but to prevent knowledge gaps and a lack of redundancy, we want to discourage working in silos. I've suggested we do some more regular demoing and documentation to avoid this, and once we start using pull requests more it will also allow the team to be more hands-on in the review process.
The team has made great progress in setting up pipelines for running ML models and iterating through different compounds to run the search for a great PFAS absorption candidate.
I check-in at the bi-weekly meetings and also encourage the team to speak up when faced with a question or challenge they may have come across. Additionally, in the event of technical challenges, I make sure to ask if the comp advisor can step in and assist in anyway, and follow-up that the help was given. Since we are in early stages as a team, I want to encourage everyone to collaborate early and often, and set the stage for a culture future iterations of this team can adopt.
I have not received much feedback but I will request some during each of my one-on-one meetings I plan to have with the researchers. Beyond that, people seem to generally appreciate my ideas and my approach to the project management.
I plan to hold asynchronous one-on-ones over slack to give researchers a less public forum to voice concerns. So far I haven't seen any need for that, but it could become more of a necessity as the project moves closer to publication, and I want to get ahead of that. As I get the github projects and milestones setup, I also hope managing it and making it available and visible to HAAG and the PFAS team will help make the project smoother as it gets more complicated.
I'm trying to better understand how to setup the Progress Tracker which was shown to us earlier in the semester. I think it could be great for my team to use it.