I have spent the last six weeks at Engine Digital. I’ve done everything from IA to development, and even some design.

Overall, it has been a good experience. Since most of my experience up until six weeks ago, consisted of working with teams of 6 people or less, I would have to say that the biggest lesson learned was communication among a bigger team.

In a group of 5 people, you can get away with verbal communication. But, when you throw an extra ten people into the mix, mistakes are easily made. Documentation becomes KEY. At Engine we use Basecamp for all our project management, todos, milestones, etc. However, even basecamp isn’t detailed enough to keep track of everything, and so for little bugs, fixes, or edits related to a project, we use Mantis.

Also just general communication among your team, is different too. With a small team, you can’t help but be involved in everyone’s projects. With a bigger team, you have to purposely ask people for feedback, make sure everything is going as planned, because time is easily wasted if you’re not aware of what everyone else is doing, and any twists that the project has taken.

Lesson Learned: Communication is good - Communication with Documentation is better