Project Planning Guide

This document is for the purposes of inspiring discussion, clarifying expectations, and surfacing values and assumptions about a given digital scholarship project. The questions are meant as a guide to discussions around important issues related to the project. Responses or notes made by the assigned DS team member will contribute to the creation of a Project Charter.

Goals/Objectives

What are the goals/objectives for this project?

Deliverables

What will this project produce?

Schedule

What are the major milestones for the project? And when will they be completed?

When are appropriate points for reporting back to DS/TLR regarding the status of the project? (use actual dates whenever possible)

Audience

Who is the intended audience of this project?

Team Members

Who are the team members? And what are their roles and responsibilities for this project?

Technical Requirements

What hardware and software are necessary for this project? When will they be needed? Who on the team will be responsible for training, maintenance, etc.?

Communication

How will team members communicate? And how frequently?

ex. Director will check in with team members weekly via email and report updates out to entire team via weekly email

ex. Through updates at monthly meetings about the project

ex. Via Slack as issues, questions, development arise

Credit, Attribution, and Intellectual Property

How should the project be cited?

How will team members be credited in the project?

ex. All team members will be listed on the project website with their roles and dates of working on the project. When referring to individual contributions, a team member can speak of that contribution as his or hers. When referring to the whole project, team members should always credit the team. We encourage everyone to share with the team when they make public mentions of the project.

Who will retain the intellectual property for this project?

How will the IP of the project be licensed?

ex. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial International 4.0

ex. Patent

ex. MIT license

Preservation and Long-Term Access

How long should the project be actively maintained? Who is responsible for updating project content? Who is responsible for updating hardware/software for this project?

How will the project be archived? What restrictions (if any) should there be to access the project now? In future?

What documentation about the project is required? Who will create it? Where will it be stored?

Outside of Scope

What is outside of the scope of this project?

Dependencies & Concerns

What does the completion of this project depend on?

What concerns do team members have about this project?