New Designer Onboarding

The Design Team is an organization within Terrapin Works where students are given the opportunity to work on design projects for both internal and external customers to the University. These projects are usually geared to utilizing the technology found within Terrapin Works by creating prototypes and doing design concept work.

The Design Team is led by Lauren Rathmann, the Design Program Manager, a full-time employee within Terrapin Works management who has many years of experience doing engineering design work for several large companies. All new projects will be filtered through Lauren who will work with a project manager to create a Statement of Work for the project. The SOW will clarify the project deliverables as well as create an estimate for budget and schedule.

After the customer agrees to the SOW the project manager will assemble a team of designers. These designers will be responsible for completing the bulk of the project work. The project manager will create tasks in Jira and assign them to designers. The designers should work to complete the assigned tasks and keep in contact with the project manager for updates on progress.

The Design Team uses a variety of tools to manage and track work. Below is a brief description of the various tools and how they are used.

Dozuki is used to document all staff workflows and will host all future training that will be created for designers and project managers within the design team. All workflows specific to the design team can be found here:

Design Team Staff Workflows

Take a moment to look over the topics currently covered by these guides.

All projects should be associated with a Jitbit ticket. Tickets are created when a customer reaches out to Terrapin Works about starting a project. The ticket is the avenue through which all client communication should happen. As a designer you will not need to use Jitbit very often but it can be helpful when joining a project to read through the communication to understand as much as possible about the requirements of the customer.

Jitbit

Jira is the project management tool used by the design team to track all tasks on projects. Jira implements a system known as “Kanban” for tracking tasks on a project in the form “cards” (or in the case of Jira, “Issues”). A card has all the relevant information for a given task attached to it, and is moved between various columns of the Kanban Board to indicate its current status (e.g. To-Do, Doing, Ready for Review, etc.).

The board for a project will list all tasks (issues) that are relevant to the project. As a project manager creates new tasks they will be assigned to a designer with an expected due date, and an estimate for the amount of time that task should take to complete.

The Design Team uses Jira in order to make sure we keep track of the current status of tasks on a project so we can:

• Easily identify blockers and stalled tasks
• Be able to review the rate of progress on a project
• Record the amount of time spent on each task for billing purposes

Take a few minutes to review all of the guides on basic Jira usage:

Basic Jira Usage

The Design Team also uses Jira to track the overall state of all current projects. The full list of projects can be found on the tracker. The tracker is structured as a Kanban Board where the column denotes the projects status.

Design Team Project Tracker

On the tracker each project is shown as an issue. This issue should have three links, the Jitbit ticket, the project board, and a google drive folder. The issue will also be assigned to the project manager.

Slack is the main venue for all internal communication within Terrapin Works. Each project should have a slack channel dedicated to that project. All communication about the project should happen in that channel. Any updates or questions should be sent to the project slack channel. All design team channels are prefixed with “talk-dt”.

Google drive is the home for any files that are relevant to a project. Each project is given a folder with a preset folder structure. Any work that is done for a project should be stored in this folder. Research notes, CAD files, presentations, calculations should all be stored in this folder. To prevent a loss of work every time you finish a shift with Terrapin Works the most recent iteration of the files you are working on should be uploaded to the drive.

Google Drive

Take a moment to check that you have access to the Terrapin Works Drive, and that you can navigate to the Design Projects folder.

For certain projects that use SolidWorks or Inventor (CAD programs which store designs as individual files) it is often preferable to use a version management system that will ensure an entire project is synchronized. This helps ensure that assemblies are not uploaded with missing components, or that conflicting versions are uploaded for different parts.

GrabCAD Workbench provides this precise tool. If you need access to the Workbench team for a project, approach the Design Team Coordinator, and your @umd.edu account will be added. You can then download the GrabCAD Workbench desktop app and use it to synchronize CAD projects just as you would use Git or similar systems for code.

After you have been assigned tasks by the project manager. You should see those tasks on you Jira Dashboard. During your design team hours you should work to complete the assigned tasks. If you have questions be sure to reach out to the project manager or others within Terrapin Works who may be able to help you. At the end of a work session you should log the work that you did to the project. See this workflow to see how to log work. Be sure to add comments about what was done and what is left. It is a good idea to leave the last 5-10 minutes of your session to have enough time to properly log work.

Work should be logged after every session, not only if a task is completed.

Logging Work

Take a few minutes to read the above guide on logging work and make sure you understand all the steps.

Be sure to upload any relevant files to the appropriate google drive folder, in the working files folder. If none of the subfolders match the work done, feel free to create a new subfolder.

If a task was completed, log the work and move the tasks from In Progress to Ready for Review or Done.