By taking Localization Project Management, I get to experience the whole production process, not only from a linguist’s perspective but also learn to work as a project manager, work with my team, from the first day we get the job till we deliver the completed project to the client.

I’ve learned the concepts involved with managing translation and localization projects, as well as the practical skills through the simulation project throughout the whole semester.

The client our team chooses is The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wiki page and Trello board are the two main tools that we use to make sure that our team are always on the same page and work efficiently.

We had problems. We made mistakes. We ran into roadblocks. But in hindsight, the benefit of the whole process is tenfold. I’m glad we get to have a post-mortem meeting as a whole class and a group as well, which is a great opportunity for us to reflect and extract the lessons learned and make sure that we can apply and validate them in our future projects.

For example, in the planning period, we would spend more time as a team to understand the project better before we split up the task in logical chunks and assign them to each team member. Also, before we start work on it, we would try to foresee what could go wrong and what would work. These preventative measures could help us improve efficiency during the execution. Execution is the challenging part. Since we are novices to time tracking at the beginning of the project, we either forget to track our time or mislabel the category. Thinking back, we should have agreed to have a consistent system of labeling in terms of our activities on Toptracker. This would have prevented the headache of having to correct labelling and avoided ambiguities working our billable time when wrapping up the project. We also suffered from the problem of trusting each other too much that we would at times hesitate to hold a member accountable for not finishing the task they were assigned. In the future, we could have a more robust and transparent system of accountability and have someone acting as the “checker” each week to carry out the task of checking that all the work has been done for a particular week by a set time. This would prevent any last-minute scrambling that may fall on one person. Another thing we definitely want to improve is that we would meet more on the regular basis as a team to share insights and identify mistakes and successes, which would make the whole project move much more smoothly in general.
Communication is the most important throughout the whole process. For our future projects, we would make sure that we have built a more direct communication channel or even multiple channels to make sure that each one of us can be reached directly and efficiently for a specific problem. Team members should gather more too. There should be no restrictions in group meeting. Everyone is at ease