Project Management
For each module, you should assign one member of your team to be the Project Manager. Everyone on your team should serve in this role at least once.
Project Status Meetings will be held four times per module, all during normal class time. Attendance at these meetings is mandatory. Failure to attend or come prepared will likely have an adverse effect on your module grade.
During the fourth and final status meeting, team members will work together to create a professional summary of their findings.
Team Member Responsibilities
Each team member (including the Project Manager) is responsible for fulfilling the following responsibilities:
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Performing data exploration work to help answer one or more of the stakeholder questions. More than one person might work on the same question, but they should work on it independently and each should approach it in different ways.
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Building, training, and testing one or more machine learning models to help address the core stakeholder question.
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Attending all project status meetings, where they will summarize the status of their work for the rest of the team and share ideas and insights regarding the work of other team members.
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Participating in the project summary writeup and presentation.
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Evaluating their own and their teammates' performance.
Project Manager's Responsibilities
The project manager is responsible for fulfilling the following responsibilities:
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Calling the status meeting to order and recording attendance.
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For each member of the team (including themselves), they:
- Read off what the team member had planned to do
- Ask them to report on the status of that item and any additional work completed
- Moderating the discussion of that work (if any).
- Recording what that team member plans to do between now and the next status meeting.
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At the final status meeting, they oversee the creation of the executive summary, and ensure that it is turned in.
The Executive Summary
The executive summary should be no more than 3 pages long, not including the title page, nor the page containing links to your github notebooks. It should address each of the stakeholder's concerns.
It might include bullet points, text, and visualizations. It should use proper grammar and spelling, and be written in business prose. The target audience is the executive team of the case study, not the data science team.
Visualizations in the Executive Summary
In your data explorations, we discussed the difference between exploratory visualizations and presentation visualizations.
If you think a visualization helps illustrate a point in the summary, make sure it is presentation quality and targeted for the correct audience. There are many interesting visualizations about model quality, training and testing, etc..., but very few of them would be appropriate to show to an execute board.
Project Reflection
After the project presentation, each team member should submit a personal reflection. The reflection document contains questions designed to help you evaluate your own performance on the project, as well as the performance of your teammates.
These ratings and suggestions will be anonymously shared with the corresponding teammate, so practice professional candor. You may find this guide on "radical candor" to be useful.
Example:
Bob: 3 – Slightly Deficient. Bob, if I could give you one piece of advice going forward, it would be to make our status meetings a priority. You have amazing contributions when you’re present and engaged, so when you miss a meeting without letting us know ahead of time, it really hurts the team.
Notice that the evaluation addresses Bob directly, not the teacher. This isn't a tattle-tale session, it's an anonymous feedback exercise.
Project Grade
Your final grade for each module will consist of a mix of your team's executive summary grade, how you rated your own performance, and how your teammates rated your performance.