RMIT Team

4HER project is developed under the course Design Management and Collaborative Studio (GRAP 2746) by RMIT University, under Bachelor of Design studies program (BP316). RMIT team acts as a remote "agency" (due to the Covid-19 situation) that responses to the client LIFE Center's job offer and work online back and forth throughout the whole process of the project.

Team members
Ha Xuan Uyen (project leader)

Ngo Bao Quyen

Nguyen Quang Thuc

Nguyen Tien Hoang

The first time the team made an introduction with the client is through the First pitch introduction page.



Name
The team was allocated by Mr. Patrice on 16/07/2021 and stayed together as a group until 16/09/2021. The reasons all four members got allocated in one group is because all four members chose Uyen's original project as the potential project to develop and work til the end of semester.

Originally, the team was allocated as Team 7 by Mr. Patrice. Later, after the first pitch with the client, the team agreed on a name for easier communication with client (since there are multiple RMIT teams working with LIFE Center in this course), and that is 4HER. "4HER" both means "for her" (ths project is dedicated to women wellbeing) and "4" also indicates the four members of the team.

Internal communication
Messenger group chat

The team first reached out to each other via Facebook and formed a Messenger group chat. This group chat is maintained for the purpose of dumping informal, casual conversation.

One of many, many discussions the team had on Messenger. Each discussion can contribute up to 100+ messages in an hour.

Slack group chat

All members wanted to learn Slack to have an additional industrially-relevant skillset. Slack is maintaind as a formal channel and used to discuss serious matter and annouce official updates

One great feature of Slack that the team took advantage of is the channels. Since the start of the team, Uyen proposed a "Meeting Recap" channel where the host of each meeting writes the recap of that (roughly) 2-hour meeting and share it to everyone. the purpose is that everyone can check their task if they forget (the tasks are also updated on Trello, see below for details), and any team member who was unable to join the meeting that day (sick leave, for eg) can read the recap and grasp what others are doing. One drawback is that not all members can active the push notifications of Slack on mobile phone for some odd reasson (for eg. Uyen who is using Android). So sometimes the notification got missed.

Microsoft Teams Since the beginning of forming team, all members agreed with setting fixed Semin-weekly meetings on every Monday and Thursday, from week 4 to Week 12. Week 3-4 were a bit different because it was the brainstorm and ideation period, so the team met 5 times in the course of 7 days (woah)

The team has an Teams group that is dedicated solely for the purpose of video meetings, both within the team and with the supervisor (Mr. Crespy)

Some screenshot of the semi weekly-meetings the team had over 9 weeks.

One record of meeting (speaking in Vietnamese): https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/00e16641-8e93-4b5b-a05a-a0f474291c3e



Trello

4HER's main Trello board is used as the main tool for distributing and keeping track of tasks, day-to-day. It is updated by everyone, preferably at the end of everyday. Below are some key aspects that we applied in project management on Trello

Color code: different colors used to identify


 * The categories of the task
 * The ones involve (for eg. Red for Client-Related task)
 * Priority levels (Refer to 4HER Project Execution)

Method used: Kanban's "Pulling technique", with a little twist. There are seven columns and the goal is pulling tasks from Backlog -> Specify -> Validate -> Delivered (with sadly some cases where a finished task ended up in No longer used)


 * Backlog: Includes all of the tasks in the project
 * Specify: Place to identity and assign tasks
 * Implement: Tasks are undergoing
 * Validate: Place for team to check tasks once it's done. Confirm that last time what if we need any adjustments
 * Delivered: Place for all the completed tasks after the confirmation, no need any fixes
 * Parking Log: Place for tasks are not in the top 1 priority
 * No longer used: Tasks are no longer valuable to the project



Miro

Place for 4HER team to brainstorm the initial ideas/sketches for the project. We discussed about the storyline (of 2 videos), concept (which art style will be applied in all products of project) and planed Kanban management

Refer to the Miro link

Google Drive

A storage that includes all the documents and files of the project. Google Drive contains not only the final products but also the old versions of it, this aims to show the process that we made

Refer to the Google Drive link

Wiki site

Wiki is our process journal in the the time working on LIFE's project. On Wiki, we have in total 26 pages, that covers:


 * Information and insights (researches, data, ideas that relevant to project)


 * Activities for each production stage (tasks - specific of what we worked on)
 * Client's feedback (what client said to improve our works)
 * Our failures and improvements (what we did to upgrade our works based on client's feedback)

Refer to Wiki link



Internal timeline
Refer to Timeline for details

Risk Management
Refer to Risk Management

Supervisor
The supervisor of the 4HER, as well as the lecturer and course coordinator of Design Management and Collaborative Studio course, is Patrice Crespy.

(Refer to Patrice Crespy for more details)

About Design Management and Collaborative Studio course
The course is providing us knowledges of design management principles and project management techniques.

Additionally, thanks to the course, 4HER team have received an opportunity to work with the actual client for the every first time in our career. We've been learning so much from the practical lessons, namely:


 * Practice in relation to key stages in the design process - what should we do in each stages of preproduction/ production/ post production
 * How to communicate and negotiate with client in professional way
 * How to apply project management theories in the reality - we're doing Kanban theories in the project
 * Integrating design in strategic decision making - define the product's concept, client's wishes and examine which design direction is relevant (refer to Design consistency, Contraception methods" package (CM), Nutrition care" package (NC), Voice actresses (CM & NC training videos)
 * Define risks and find the solutions (refer to Risk Form)

RMIT Univeristy
Bachelor of Design studies are playing an important role in this LIFE's project. They are providing knowledges (creative thinking, project management principles) and practical skills of design (project management techniques, graphic design and visual communication, illustration and digital imaging and 3D modeling) that support us to complete the task (refer to  Contraception methods" package (CM), Nutrition care" package (NC))

RMIT University get ready "materials" for us not only in this project but also in our future career. A lovely smile with big THANK YOU to you!