Hey guys,
It seems that despite my frankly awesome start to the year with my World Eaters project, I've unfortunately landed myself in a hobby rut. It has has felt like a disaster but it has got me thinking about what went well with my World Eaters project, what went badly, what I need to improve and so on and this made me think of work...
That's no bad thing - I've got an awful lot of experience in project planning as a software engineer and more specifically, I have experience in various development lifecycles. For example, my World Eaters project was done almost in using Waterfall (admittedly unconsciously!):
- I worked out my requirements...
- ...planned the project...
- ...ordered everything in and did everything according to the plan (including weekly milestones to achieve so I had something new to show in the weekly progress reports)...
- ...made sure everything was good to go (checking if my basing etc were all completed and nothing missed from my original requirements)...
- ...and pretty much signed it off with time to spare.
And this made sense as I had a specific set of requirements and a specific deadline (ToS) up-front so it made it easy to do and it worked really well in my opinion.
However, since ToS, I haven't done nearly as much hobby stuff. I've kinda been pottering around, doing odds and sods and not really getting anywhere and the reason for this is that I am missing both the hobby goal and a deadline so what I did earlier this year won't work unless I fix that - easier said than done! I always had the inspiration and desire to do my World Eaters, just no deadline to do it for.
Where am I going with this? Well, I have a project I've been setting myself up for (Custodians) and a deadline that I'd like to complete them by (~22nd September - a week before the campaign weekend I advertised last week). However, I don't feel ready to do the project as I'm not entirely happy with my own requirements so doing it the Waterfall way isn't going to work - especially if i started on it right now. What I feel I need to do is take on a smaller project and use that to drive the Custodes one - I'm going to do a proof of concept by doing a Blood Bowl team:
- It's a squad of characters so I need to paint some things en-mass but ultimately the detailing has to be done model by model - just like with the Custodes to do them justice
- I can use the a similar colour scheme to what I intend to do for the Custodes to make sure I am happy with it - I am currently unsure how well I can do it
- It hopefully will give me enough momentum to push me into the Custodes project and hit the ground running with a more well refined project and confidence that I can complete it too.
So yeah, hopefully you'll see a hobby update from me this week as I make a start on that.
I feel this post probably will give you more insight into how I plan my projects more than anything else but I hope it does help anyone who feels a bit lost in what they want to do with their hobby projects. If you have a different approach to planning a project, write a comment below as I'd be very interested to hear from you - I feel I could improve my productivity but I haven't got myself to a happy medium as I can go from doing nothing to doing a hyper condensed project and then back to doing nothing instead of going at a more leisurely pace to achieve the same end result in a similar time frame.
Until next time!
Hector Cephas
