Practical MLOps

Appendix H. Technical Project Management

By Noah Gift

On the first week of the highly technical class on cloud computing, I brought up technical project management and how important it is to do what I describe in this appendix. A student raised their hand in class and asked the following question: “Is this a project management class? I thought this class is about cloud computing?”

Similarly, in the real world, it is easy to think project management doesn’t matter. A small amount of technical project management knowledge is critical to MLOps, though. Three essential components of project management are as follows:

• Attempt to plan your project out of the time you have to complete it, i.e., 12 weeks using weekly milestones.

• Do a weekly demo to your team showing the progress.

• Break tasks into 4-hour chunks of time and do them weekly, keeping track of them with a simple task tracking system like Trello or GitHub.

Now, let’s cover just enough of the basics to make sure you are successful.

Project Plan

There is nothing unique about MLOps regarding project management. Still, it is worth pointing out a few nonobvious highlights of project management that help build machine learning projects. In particular, one powerful concept in building ML solutions is to think in terms of a 10–12 week schedule and attempt to map out the individual results for each week. In the book’s source code repository, there is an example template to follow.

A takeaway is that a plan creates the scaffolding ...