Tag: Project Management

Who should localise the graphics?

Virtual Team Project – Week 7

This week, the translation team worked away on the translation and the French graphics. They now have an almost final draft which requires some editing and formatting. However, my fears about the graphics have materialised.

When the translation team said they would take care of the French graphics, I was on the fence.

On one hand, they are in the best position to get the most accurate French screenshots, because they are accessing each screen during the translation. Also, they know both languages so they can easily match the French to the English, whereas our graphics designer is Irish and may not have the necessary level in French to do that matching work as quickly. I am sure he could do it, but it would take more time.

On the other hand, graphics design is another complex task that requires specific skills and tools. It’s one thing to dabble in Photoshop and to know how to edit photos and how to create simple drawings, it’s another thing to create elaborate graphics from screenshots and to be able to replicate the same process multiple times.

I had to create localised graphics as a project manager and maybe my more than inadequate skills in graphics design influence my opinion, but I think the graphics design skills should take precedence in graphics localisation. Give the designer the right screenshots and you should be fine. Give a non-designer the right design tools and I’m not sure you will get the right results. The non-designer might do great work, but it will be harder to recreate identical designs.

Nevertheless, the translation team showed a lot of confidence that they could take care of the graphics, so I decided not to push my preferences. This is one aspect of teamwork that might be the hardest to manage. Knowing when you should push back and impose a decision vs knowing when to take a step back and accept that other options might work just as well.

Today’s experience is timely. The person I interviewed for our interview assignment yesterday mentioned this as one of the biggest challenges of leading a team. In a team, everyone is an expert in an area and values their own input. One of the project manager’s jobs is to balance these egos, including his/her own. And I don’t mean “ego” in a negative, self-centered sense.

Our timeframe played a significant role in my decision. If we had to turn around the translation and the localised graphics within a few days only, I would have tried to impose the graphics designer option. However, this assignment is about honing our collaboration skills and trying new working strategies – and we had four weeks. Also, we agreed that the graphics designer would review the graphics and might intervene if necessary.

This weekend, the translation team shared their draft with localised graphics. The graphics are of high quality, with a good resolution and some interesting ideas, but they are very different from the source graphics. I had not anticipated this. It was obvious to me that the localised graphics should be identical to the source graphics (except for the text, obviously). However, the translators did their own thing here. I have never seen localised graphics that are completely different from the source graphics except when the available localised content is also completely different, which does not happen that much. I do wonder if that might happen more than what I have experienced…

This particular project is a valuable experiment in graphics design if only because it shows that different designers may come up with highly different graphics to showcase the same information, and all options may be valid. Still, with only one week left, we cannot spend more time experimenting. Other team members agreed that our graphics designer should take care of the localised graphics in order to ensure a consistent look across languages, and the translation team has provided him with the screenshots. We are now on the last stretch of this project and everything seems under control. We do not have any other “experiment” in progress, so I am cautiously confident.

Musings on informal deadlines

Virtual Team Project – Week 5

Since my last post on Saturday 23rd February, our team did two more rounds of review on the English instructions before we delivered them to the translation team on Monday 25th. The rest of the week was very quiet. Because our two translators were on their winter break, the rest of the team was able to rest as well, or at least we were all able to take a step back from the project and focus on other courses and assignments

Of course, we could not escape last minute changes. Several members of our team reviewed the final instructions during the weekend, including a dedicated “final proofreader”, and they highlighted small details that had managed to evade our attention until then. Editing and reviewing really are never-ending tasks that require commitment and open communication until the very end. Nevertheless, we prevailed and had the document ready by the deadline.

Speaking of the deadline, there was no official deadline per se, though many of us in our team (including myself) and in other teams assumed we had to hand in this first draft to our module directors on Monday 25th February even though it would not be graded. That was not the case. The confusion may stem from the assignment brief mentioning that we should “submit” the first draft by Monday 25th February. Or we might all be obsessing over deadlines these days.

But I wonder… Would the English draft have been ready for translation by Monday 25th February if we thought this was a “soft” deadline? In a real-life project, checking the meaning of deadlines would have been a priority. In this project, it seemed that, official or not, this deadline was meant to provide us with guidance and structure. Without a clear, official deadline, would delays have been more likely? I think so, and it would have been harder for me as project manager to justify my pushing back in that case. Even when there are no official deadlines for a project or a task, setting an informal deadline forces people to define a structure and a plan for action, and to stick to them. And it improves accountability.

As a freelance translator, most of my deadlines are short (so short), formal deadlines. Even then, I usually set other informal deadlines for translation and proofreading tasks, for administrative tasks, private business, etc. When I started freelancing, financial uncertainty was the biggest source of stress. It still is. This led me to accept any and all projects and I was quickly drained of all energy. I had to learn to set personal goals and deadlines and, most importantly, to stick to them.

The last part was more difficult, but I finally learnt to say “no” for my health. I have somewhat “fell off the wagon” as I juggle freelancing and the Master’s programme and the second semester is especially demanding. Not knowing when the next translation request will come in makes it difficult to organise my time by setting personal deadlines. Fortunately, financial uncertainty aside, freelancing means I can say “no” to work requests, which is not an option for many of my fellow students. I wonder how they cope with their workloads, studies and private lives.

Sailing toward a common goal

Virtual Team Project – Week 2

After a slow start with some scheduling difficulties, this week Team 2 agreed on a roadmap, picked up speed and is now one day ahead of schedule. In this post, I reflect on the challenges that we faced and how we prevailed. All the time mentions refer to the Irish/French time zones unless otherwise indicated.

Coordination

When we started sharing individual availability to set up a live team meeting, it quickly became evident that such a meeting would not happen this week either. Between studies, part-time or full-time jobs, and several time zones, the highest team count in any time slot was five out of ten. Five hardly seemed enough. Any decision made during the live meeting would ignore the input of half of the team. We could use the opportunity to at least get to know one another, but we would still exclude five people.

Why not have several partial meetings then? I did not suggest it because several meetings would mean an even greater time commitment from all members without the same social or task benefits as a full team meeting.

Without the possibility of a team meeting, we had to rely on our Whatsapp group chat. Still, I hope we can organize at least one team meeting or some task-focused partial meetings.

Task-oriented asynchronous communication

This particular virtual project is different from regular projects in a professional setting because our team members have to balance a student life (with several projects), a professional life (with other projects) and a personal life. At the same time, we all need to be able to rely on one another and to maintain a dynamic sharing of information and opinions. At least in the past week, we seem to have adopted a communication pattern:

  • As the project manager, I start the day by listing the topics that we should discuss for the day and I ask the team members to share other topics they would like to tackle (the agenda).
  • Then I might get the first topic “on the table” and make suggestions. I would rather avoid always making suggestions. However, in this asynchronous setting and with our busy schedules, I find that calling for feedback on my suggestions helps to launch the discussion.
  • Team members start to participate depending on their respective schedules. The discussion continues until late in the evening – until US team members have had a chance to participate after work/college.
  • Then, I recap the tasks we have completed and the decisions we have made. I also propose the next agenda. This way the US members can start to give their input and think about what they want to share or need from their team members.

The whole team stepped up to make asynchronous communication work. Everyone was up and running on Whatsapp by Wednesday morning. By Friday evening, we had agreed on a topic for the instructions, a detailed schedule and a new tester role. The writing/editing team (two in Orlando and two in Limerick) also agreed to have the first draft ready by Monday.

Fast forward to Sunday afternoon and the first draft is ready one day ahead of schedule and all four writing/editing members contributed content and feedback. This is great progress in a short amount of time.

Conclusion

Maybe we were not able to have a live meeting to get to know each other, but everyone focussed on reaching team goals and displayed a proactive and optimistic attitude. Asynchronous communication may have made us more efficient because our discussions are task-oriented. While we have not had casual chats, we are starting to share more personal information little by little. It seems that, for our team, bonding will happen slowly over the course of the project. This week showed that we can already trust one another.

Back in the Saddle?

Virtual Team Project – Week 1

So, here’s the deal. My fellow Limerick students and I have to participate in a virtual collaboration project with students in Orlando and Paris. Together, we need to write instructions for an online tool and then translate these instructions into French. That does seem in my wheelhouse… This past week was all about getting to know each other, assigning roles, and deciding the basics of our communication and management processes. Simple, right? Not so much when you have ten people spread over three countries and as many universities.

We saw quickly that we would not have a live online team meeting this week and we would have to rely on emails until everyone joined our Whatsapp group. Long email threads are not ideal, though they were the norm where I was a project manager so I might be more comfortable with them than my teammates.

I am a bit anxious at the thought of Whatsapp being our main means of communication. May I remind you that there are TEN of us? Have you ever tried to organise anything online with more than two people? Don’t get me wrong, a group chat is great: because it is informal, people may share their thoughts more freely. But is it adapted for structured communication and for making decisions? In my opinion, email or any other structured form of communication is still required to keep the focus on set objectives. One option: I may recap the chat daily (or as needed) to summarise what came of it.

Yes, I am the team’s project manager. That was not my intention as I thought the role could provide a useful experience for someone else. I had my eye on a localisation consultant/editor role. Eventually, I did take over planning this week and though I offered to step back, my teammates agreed to leave me this role. In my previous experience, the rules were more clear-cut – I made the decisions based on data from all the project stakeholders (internal client stakeholders, translators, proofreaders, post-localisation designers, reviewers, etc.). In this project, I think we will all benefit from having everyone participate in the decision-making process. So, the main challenge for me will be to foster structured individual engagement – in Whatsapp. Let’s see how this goes.