Major Project – Outcome Project Management

Project managing was difficult due to the pressures of the company and the different stages it has been going through over the two years. When the course was started, there were five people in the company, there are now only two. This has meant that personal spare time has eroded leaving a considerably smaller amount of time with which to complete the MA. The Talking Walls is a large production and perhaps would be normally created by a team of people with individual and specific skills. Knowing this and that it would be just one person meant that time had to be managed very closely, no matter how small or large the amount time. Having my own resources such as the relevant software and machines meant that more time could be spent working than travelling to use the Institute’s resources. For the latter part of the major project, the laptop being used was changed for a newer one that was very much faster. This helped considerably in the rendering of the different tours. A tour that took 11 hours on the old one only took 5 hours on the new machine, a very worthwhile timesaver, which helped considerably in achieving the level of work. The built-in CD-Writer saved an incredible amount of time in transferring files.

One other important aid with the new machine is its ability to work across multiple monitors. This had been tried in the past with the last laptop without success. Due to the nVIDIA graphics card, the later machine allows this through its own control panel. I wasn’t aware of this until it was mentioned that it may be a good idea to present on dual monitors. One screen to show the project and the other to show the directory tree of files created. This would then show the amount of files created for the template that had not been incorporated in the Matrix for the presentation, i.e. the background work. Finding out how to change to dual monitors has been very beneficial, as in the future I will be able to use the feature to work across the two screens as well as presentations.