With a Body Composition Screening, you'll be able to determine your BMI & body fat percentage. FREE to all students, faculty, & staff. For more info or to make an appt. contact 410-455-1558 or galli1@umbc.edu.

In response to my previous article How to Project Manage Part-time People, a commenter named Tristan Bailey asked me, “How do you break up the project or decide on milestones to keep everyone with a similar goal but small time?” That’s a great question and something that goes hand-in-hand with project managing a small part-time team. At Uncover, we’re five people, but only one out of the five of us is full-time, so picking good milestones and project managing is really important for us if we’re going to successfully push product updates.

One of the many hats I wear is the equivalent of Head of Product. That means different things to different companies, but generally it’s the job of the Head of Product to figure out what you need to build to be successful, while developing the roadmap and milestones. You make use of the feedback from your team and from your customers, together with your intuition, to determine what the best course of action is.

Communicating with customers, conducting usability tests, doing research, and so on are potentially a full-time job, but as this bundle of activities amounts to only one of my many roles, I need to prioritize what are must do’s ahead of everything else.
Determining a must do is actually a lot simpler than it sounds. Does your product absolutely positively need this feature, design, copy, etc., for you to not only ship it but for it to be successful? If it’s not going to add to the success of what you ship then it’s not a must do. When we’re talking about success, we’re generally talking about increasing our customer base and – more importantly – revenue.

Revenue is very important to us because, as a small company with few resources, the more money we make the more resources we can apply to grow our business. More resources generally means more hours and more hours means more money if we’re smart about how we put those hours to use. Nice to have’s don’t increase revenue and therefore should be tabled.

After I’ve gathered together the must do’s for the next update to Uncover, I get together with my team to discuss them. We don’t worry about the future beyond the next update, as we don’t have the time do so, so every question I ask them is simple: Is this something that we need to have or do to be successful in our next update? Everything that we agree on as a yes gets added to the project management spreadsheet and everything that gets a no is stored away in a Github Issue as tbd.

After we have our must do’s in our project management spreadsheet, our next milestone is set. Things will get added and removed during the production phase, but that’s unavoidable. Planning is now mostly complete, and then begins the development, design and project management phase. Proper planning and avoiding milestone bloat will really help you ship faster updates that have bigger impact.

The post How to Break Up a Project into Milestones appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Former UMBC Retriever basketball standout Ryan Cook has signed a professional contract with OKK Sloboda Tuzla in the Bosnian Liga I in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Cook finished the 2012-13 season with 478 points, the ninth-most in school history. He was selected to the America East Conference Second Team and to the 2013 America East All-Tournament team after averaging 22.0 points per game in two postseason contests.

Cook excelled at the June 2013 First Team All iBall Pro Combine, which was scouted by a group of former and current NBA and overseas players. He averaged 16.0 points per game during the combine, which ranked second amongst the 43 players that were invited.

OKK Sloboda Tuzla was the runner-up in both the regular season and the championships of Liga I in 2012-13.