Team DIANA, which stands for Ducti Ingenio Accipimus Naturam Astrorum, is led by a group of students in the research and development of robotics for space application.
The robotics team was first created in 2008 at the Polytechnic University of Turin. To this day, they continue to lead the way in the design and development of rovers for space exploration and human assistance.
Team DIANA has participated in many European Rover Challenges, including one in Starachowice, Poland, where they scored 15th place among 65 competing rovers in 2008.
Go, team! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 🤩
If Team DIANA could develop plans for rover prototypes using basic software tools, just imagine how much more they’d be able to accomplish with a powerful project management tool like ClickUp!
We had the pleasure of virtually connecting with Alessandro from Team DIANA. Read on to learn how he plans to use ClickUp to organize and schedule activities, get a broader view of projects, and standardize their processes.
This Article Contains:
- Tell us about Team DIANA!
- Have you used project management software before ClickUp?
- What tools, if any, do you integrate with ClickUp?
- How has ClickUp improved your work and life?
- What ClickUp features do you currently use to manage team projects and activities?
- About how many hours a week do you save using ClickUp?
Summarize this article for me pleaseTell us about Team DIANA!
The best way to describe our team is by outlining our mission and vision statements on which we worked extensively in the past months.
Shortly, our team can be defined as “a group of friends that makes rover.”
Going more specifically, our mission statement is:
Inside DIANA, students from different backgrounds can find a comfortable and inspiring environment to learn and grow together while turning challenging tasks into fun activities.
We are curious, ambitious, and determined students who share a passion for research and innovation. Being part of DIANA means to be always ready for a new challenge.
Our projects are the result of our ambition and teamwork. With cooperation and communication at the basis of our work, we develop advanced models of space exploration rovers.
We cover every aspect of project development, from Management to Engineering, while also carrying out Media and Image management activities: in the team, every skill and knowledge, not only aerospace-related ones, can find its role!
As far as our vision statement goes, our main goal is to become skilled professionals while working with friends, not simply colleagues. In an environment where we can make mistakes, try new approaches and take risks.
We want to grow and improve together, making a hands-on experience in a real space project, trying to contribute to the world of Space Exploration.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHave you used project management software before ClickUp?
At the moment, we also use Google Spreadsheet and Microsoft Project for tasks related to project management.
However, Google Spreadsheet doesn’t always have the right tools for visualizing all the data, and it might easily become dispersive.
Microsoft Project, instead, doesn’t allow real-time collaboration with our current licenses, and it is difficult to use for non-expert people like all the members that deal with more technical activities rather than management-related ones.
The result is that only a few people can actually use this tool, leading to time waste and overload.
We also use Valispace, which is a new software mainly thought for design and engineering. It’s great for managing requirements and creating engineering models of our rovers, but time and resource management features are not mature enough.
Slack and Discord are other software on our “deck.” However, they’re so deeply integrated and stabilized within our processes that we don’t plan on changing too much how we use them in the short term.
Actually, apart from MS Project, we cannot discard the other tools since, for our specific context, each of them is the best for something.
However, ClickUp represents the glue that holds and joins together all of these tools, simplifying and structuring our procedures.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat tools, if any, do you integrate with ClickUp?
We are integrating Google Drive, which, for the moment, is our primary file storage tool. We also use Slack, Discord, and Google Calendar that we plan to all integrate with ClickUp.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow has ClickUp improved your work and life?
ClickUp is helping us with the planning and scheduling of our activities.
It gives us a clearer view of task dependencies and duration.
Unfortunately, ClickUp isn’t fully integrated into our processes, so there’s still room for improvement. However, we hope that the complete integration of ClickUp will eventually simplify processes and provide a clearer and broader view of the projects and the team!
We will use the earned time to define new strategies and approaches to simplify our processes and resolve problematic situations.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat ClickUp features do you currently use to manage team projects and activities?
There are about 3 to 4 features that help us manage our activities.
Gantt Charts and Milestones are the most important ones since they would ease the planning of our activities, allowing for a clearer view of tasks duration and dependencies.
These features would also help monitor and track the status of the activities.
Google Drive integration would also play a fundamental role since most of our data is kept there. This feature would help with the accessibility of all the material that we store in many different folders.
Another feature that could help us is Mind Map.
It would enable us to create diagrams that we usually need to provide as part of the documentation asked for our competitions.
The Workload might also be useful, although that’s not fully defined, considering that we don’t follow specific working hours and perform our tasks at random times during the week.
Summarize this article for me pleaseAbout how many hours a week do you save using ClickUp?
At the moment, we haven’t completely integrated ClickUp into our processes. Therefore, we’re not really saving time… yet.
We’re still trying to find the most suited configuration that could work for us, which requires still some time.
Being a team of volunteers, we don’t follow any defined working calendar, making it harder to identify wastes of time and ways to avoid them.
We hope that by using ClickUp for planning and scheduling our activities, we could standardize our processes to the point that it becomes easier to identify criticalities and wastes of time.
We will use the earned time to define new strategies and approaches to simplify our processes and resolve/improve problematic situations!
Looking to follow along on Alessandro and Team’s DIANA’s journey in space exploration? Check them out on their website here and sign up for ClickUp today to discover how you can streamline your work processes and skyrocket your productivity! 🚀
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