During the course of the Fall 2018 semester at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, a few of my colleagues and I were responsible for developing a Project Management Office to simulate a localization project for a client. The goal of the project was to experience a real life localization project from beginning to end in order to experience the responsibilities and tasks of a project manager throughout the course of the project.
As part of these tasks, we created a virtual office for the project including a workflow created with Trello (seen below) as well as an online repository for all pertinent company, client, and project information through DokuWiki.
Trello Workflow:
DokuWiki:
Our company “Sea L10n Enterprises” chose the Monterey Bay Aquarium as a client for the project. The client’s home page had already been localized into Spanish, so we made it our mission to localized the Spanish homepage into six additional languages: Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, German, and French.
In order to accomplish this, we had to organize the structure of our virtual office first, the end result of which can be seen in the DokuWiki sitemap pictured above, so that we could ensure a smooth project.
As project managers, we learned a variety of invaluable lessons along the way to make the project proceed without major setbacks. The first of these lessons was the importance of standards associated with the processes of localization and project management. For example, ISO standards 21500, 10006, 9001, among others, are all crucial to how companies proceed through localization projects while maintaining strict ethical practices.
The next major lesson learned was the need for heavy front-end investment in time and cost to a project. Devoting a significant number of hours to client communication, project preparation, talent recruitment, and project specifications will ideally allow the back-end of the project to be quick, straightforward, and smooth. As you might have noticed from our Trello workflow, the project was divided into three major segments: Pre-Production, Production, and Post-Production. The Pre-Production card contains up to two or three times as much content and checklists as the other two segments!
Of course, it is also necessary to mention how we tracked our time throughout the project. We used an online time tracker called “Toptracker”. The importance of time tracking and staying within budget simply cannot be overstated.
We learned early on in the project that we would need to be exhaustively specific when tracking time on our individual tasks lest we risk going over budget. And, for that matter, we also learned that we needed a good understanding of the entire flow of the project from start to finish in order to accurately estimate a budget and provide a quote to the client. Time, in the context of a localization project, then, is perhaps one of the most precious resources that a project manager must work with. And after working through our semester-long localization project, we got a good sense of how our time was spent.
It was through our analysis of the Toptracker time report, that we could determine how better to spend our time managing a project. Which leads to the last major lesson: QA and the Post-Mortem evaluation. Both QA and the Post-Mortem are crucial to understanding what, if anything, went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again or how to improve processes and practices to make it better. QA is an ongoing process and is equally as important as project preparation in ensuring a project completed within a designated timeframe and budget. The Post-Mortem, on the other hand, is a comprehensive look at everything that occurred within the project and an analysis of how the entire project flow could be improved.
Thus, our Post-Mortem analysis revealed a multitude of ways in which we could improve while also showing the extent of our work throughout the semester.
As a final note, here are the final deliverables we produced (via Google Drive: Copy the link and paste into your browser to download):
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1BSd4Th65hhBLi9u-0cvlHDkyhNN0HDct