Visual Aids and Productivity tools

Introduction

As discussed in the previous blog post, my project is to create a Web scraper to search for recipes and filter them for allergen groups. As part of the research, I want to compare the performance of different web scraping techniques and the performance of different languages. This is quite a lot of deliverables, to begin with. Not only that, but I also want to write an extensive write-up of my development experience and my results. Furthermore, I also know that the project might change. I don’t know, for example, how successful my bots will be without building them. One reason for this would be anti-bot validation. Certain methods may be more effective if this is very prominent, which may be a whole avenue for research.

As a result, project management, especially time management, will be essential for finishing this project to any degree of success. In this blog post, I will compare a few tools and charts I have found and how effective they may be.

My usual approach

I’ve never worked on a project as large as this before. At most, I’ve had to work on a few small pieces of software or maybe a larger report of several thousand words. Managing these never takes more than a couple of weeks at most. That said, I already use some DIY visual tools to manage them.

 The above is what I usually make for my university assignments. I list out each ‘component’ of an assessment and then give a date by which I would like to have done it. Each component starts on red for not completed at all, and this is changed to yellow for begun but not finished and eventually to green for completed. For this project, however, the potential deliverables are of a similar size to the project for which I made the design above.

The current potential deliverables for this project are:

• Website UI for the tool
• A web scraper that uses google metadata
• A web scraper that uses R
• A web scraper that uses Python
• Analysis of the performance of each of these web scrapers
• A final dissertation report of 10,000 words

Furthermore, I’m unsure how to adapt this method to a project over several months, so perhaps it is time to find some new tools.

Gantt Charts

The above chart is an example of a Gantt Chart. As you can see, you can break down a project into tasks and then show when these should be worked on and when they should finish. It should be relatively easy to expand or modify when a job should be completed if it overruns. Timelines I’ve used in the past have a habit of overrunning, and the whole timeline needs to be modified. Having said that, it still assumes a procedural development approach which is a disadvantage.

Kanban Boards 

Kanban Boards allow you to break down a project into individual tasks as well but will enable you to categorise them in terms of urgency. Things that are prioritised are put on the to-do list, while items in progress can be labelled as such. This categorisation is excellent, and I can see how it improves productivity, but I’m not sure it adds more information than my informal spreadsheets.

RACI diagrams

Another example of a product management visual is RACI diagrams. They allow each task to be displayed in terms of who needs to do what about it. I’m sure these are very useful for group projects, but to me, they aren’t beneficial as my project will be a solo project.

All in all, I am tempted to adopt the Gantt chart for the overall project and combine the strengths of the Kanban boards with my own excel sheets. What I like about the Gantt charts is that I can make them in excel, a piece of software I know
well.