Planning Sessions

By Charlotte

Task: Outline new planning sessions

Beyond the Gantt chart and meeting logs mentioned in (T-17, Project Management), another one of the biggest additions to the team with the project management role are planning sessions. Planning sessions are a seemingly simple concept, but the team has struggled with actually implementing them. The main purpose of these sessions are to set off each member with a game plan, one that will keep them productive, engaged, and helpful to the progression of the team.

These planning sessions take place around the main monitor in our robot house at the beginning of each practice, with a document pulled up to record our agenda. Often the whole team cannot be present, but if not the project manager reaches out to those members individually and let's them know the discussion that was had. Each session is recorded in an agenda that separates objectives into its subteam: engineering, code, blog, and miscellaneous. Each agenda is then included at the beginning of each meeting log and frequently referenced to throughout the log.

These sessions seem like an obvious addition to the team, but we have struggled to implement this change in past years. With a project manager, there is a leading voice in these meetings that emphasizes their importance. In the future, hopefully attendance to these meetings will improve, and the whole team will recognize them as incredibly important to our success. Ways to ensure this improvement are for the project manager to create outlines before each meeting and to begin these discussions over Discord during the week in the #planning channel so that we can solidify these plans during the planning session.