This blog will aim to discuss the project plan’s of Thinking Bee and how each of them changed. As well as this, the effectiveness and appropriateness of the project plan will be reflected upon in order to take a closer look at, and potentially improve my project management skills. A project plan is extremely important in any project, as it allows every member of the project to be aware of scheduling, resource requirements as well as for coherence between all members (“Importance of Developing a Project Plan”, 2017).
As I have outlined in a previous blog, the second project consisted of Riley, Nathan and myself. The project began with us having a pretty clear outline of what we wanted to do, however the genre of what we wanted to create wasn’t really determined. Overall, we decided we wanted to create a 3 track EP using unique, self-recorded samples from 3 different objects for each song. For the first track, we wanted to use only samples recorded from a car, the second track using only samples from a loaf of bread, and the third track using only samples from a cigar box guitar. From this, a project plan was created using this scope.
From this plan, we immediately changed our outlook and decided that an update was needed. This was due to the fact that, after a couple of weeks of planning we really hadn’t got started on any deliverables. Because of this, we decided to downsize the scope of the project to something more manageable, and settled on recording samples from the 3 sound sources, however only producing 1 track instead of 3, and having a sample pack to go alongside it. Our plan then came to fruition after we presented our new idea to everyone in week 10(?), when we recorded samples from the car after this. From here, a simple beat was made and some synths began development using the sound from the car horn. The next day, I recorded bread samples and uploaded these to splice where we had been collaborating the projects back and forth. These samples were added to the drum-line for the most part.
After this, we went in to the MIDI studio on Wednesday of the same week with the goal of beginning to create the track. Nathan brought in the Cigar box guitar and various other instruments in case we wanted to use those also. I must say the guitar looked quite incredible however, one of the strings had broken and tuning the thing was near impossible. Because of this, we again changed our plan and recorded a single saxophone note and used this instead of any guitar. This note was used to create a bass-line and some synth chords and arp. Here’s a photo of our single note being played!
And here’s another photo of the guitar that we chose not to use in our track. You can see that a string is missing and have a general look at the guitar!
Each time and after each change, the project plan was updated accordingly so as to continually have an updated project plan and so that we had a consistent idea of where we were heading and could refer to this at any necessary point in time.
In reflection of overall project management for this project, I believe that we were successful in managing the project as a whole. In future, it is probably a good idea to look forward further than a couple of weeks to identify any possible time constraints so that we don’t originally come up with a plan that features a scope that is too big or too small, as ours was definitely too big following the first few weeks of project 2 work. Despite this, our continual face to face meetings and updating each other on Facebook, Splice and through google drive meant that our project always saw the attention necessary to complete it on time and to a quality standard.
References:
Importance of Developing a Project Plan. (2017). Smallbusiness.chron.com. Retrieved 8 December 2017, from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-developing-project-plan-51745.html
(2017). Splice. Retrieved 8 December 2017, from https://splice.com/explore
Connor 