jcaram
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I've been dealing with this problem for a while:
How do you manage a hardware design project which is not part of your (day) job and your team is not contractually tied to it or to you?
For example, right now I'm an ECE graduate student and I'm working on developing some test equipment, which is totally unrelated to my school/research work, part of it will probably be released as open-source hardware, and my collaborators are a couple of other graduate students that I've recruited. There is no money involved right now, maybe just some spending (mostly me) on prototyping, and they are in it for the learning and potential start-up money. The time for the project is mostly after-work/school time.
Most projects I'm interested in are of fair complexity, requiring several team members and last several months to several years. The result of this is that I need to spend most of my time managing the projects when the number of people working on them is >=3. The nature of the projects make it very hard to split into small parts and delegate. It's almost impossible to set deadlines as each person's contribution to the projects varies a lot from person to person and throughout time. The problem get really bad when one person's progress depends on others' progress.
I've looked all over the internet and explored some technology management books, but everything refers to projects within a company. Nothing that I can really use to organize a project like this. It's surprising because these days informal collaboration is so popular (mostly open-source software).
I would really like to find some solid material on the subject. Thanks all.
How do you manage a hardware design project which is not part of your (day) job and your team is not contractually tied to it or to you?
For example, right now I'm an ECE graduate student and I'm working on developing some test equipment, which is totally unrelated to my school/research work, part of it will probably be released as open-source hardware, and my collaborators are a couple of other graduate students that I've recruited. There is no money involved right now, maybe just some spending (mostly me) on prototyping, and they are in it for the learning and potential start-up money. The time for the project is mostly after-work/school time.
Most projects I'm interested in are of fair complexity, requiring several team members and last several months to several years. The result of this is that I need to spend most of my time managing the projects when the number of people working on them is >=3. The nature of the projects make it very hard to split into small parts and delegate. It's almost impossible to set deadlines as each person's contribution to the projects varies a lot from person to person and throughout time. The problem get really bad when one person's progress depends on others' progress.
I've looked all over the internet and explored some technology management books, but everything refers to projects within a company. Nothing that I can really use to organize a project like this. It's surprising because these days informal collaboration is so popular (mostly open-source software).
I would really like to find some solid material on the subject. Thanks all.
