Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Filed under: project_management

Project Milestones

Too often in the midst of a project, I grapple with making sense of what’s been done, what’s to do, what foggy ideas have sprung to mind and how to call them back to mind, and where I am in the whole mess.  While there is no substitute for clear and simple thinking, I’m not always blessed with that.  The devil is in the details of any project, and what starts as a simple goal with just a few steps often ends up teetering on all of the realities which come to light along the way.
While this may sound dramatic, I’m sure you can relate to the occasional feeling of inertia midway through an important project.  If you’re like me, you’ve been employing healthy doses of action and only minor doses of planning and tracking.  While it makes sense to spend the valuable resource of time on actually accomplishing your goal, you want to keep your footing sure along that path.  In this case, having been sick for a week has done a number on my ability to come back in full stride, so this seems like an opportune time to think about tools and processes to help get and keep things on track.
One great motivator for me is understanding how much time I’ve spent on things.  I’m always pushing along more than one project.  And sometimes I like to call it a day at 5 when I really haven’t put in a full day’s work.  And when it comes to things I like to ignore out of convenience, time-tracking is usually the first to go.
So I’m raising my consciousness in that area once again.  In the past I’ve used Excel spreadsheets to track time.  The handy Ctrl-: (Ctrl-Shift-;) puts in timestamps automatically, and lots of pretty formulas and graphs are a few clicks away.  I keep things simple, so I just track time in and out, not really per-project.
The issue with this is that it’s handy if I want to compare my log to my clocked hours on my paycheck, but it’s not a big motivator and it’s like the lawn…it grows and needs trimming and management periodically.  It’s not a motivator because it’s not easy to see the difference between a day worked hard and a day worked only so-so.  Something a bit more graphical might be useful for that.
I’m trying Klok for that reason.  Lifehacker readers give it the time-tracking five nod, so it can’t be all bad.  So far, it’s simple enough to make it easy to track a few projects at once.  It’s graphical, so it’s easy to see how hard I’ve been working which is nice.  It stays out of the way.  I’m looking forward to seeing how well it puts data out for timesheets/excel/tracking on issues.  It’s not an issue-tracking application, it’s not a project management application, which are reasons I like it so far.  I like applications that stick to doing one thing well and offer ways to integrate with my existing apps.
As far as project planning goes, I’ve got Redmine and some other project planning applications, but nothing I’m really happy with for just showing the overall train of things and where I am.  Today I broke out XMind and made a simple flow for one of my projects using the tree view, which allows for some order.  It’s not really meant for such things, but it’s good because it’s simple and visual, flexible to rearrange and has good status icons.  Not shareable enough though.  Their online mindmap sharing is pretty weak.  I’d like to post an editable, viewable version to Redmine’s wiki, but there’s currently no way to do that and not looking good on the horizon.  In the meantime I’ve decided to just save a copy of the picture to the netdrive to link from the Redmine wiki.  I added a lot more explanation of what the whole process is on the wiki page itself.  So the picture is kind of the “milestones” and where I am, whereas the page text is the more detailed plan.  It might be appropriate to link some of the items on the page to actual issues in the tracking system.  Of course, the overview is still useful (although maybe I should check out the Redmine Gantt?), so despite the fact that it’s not integrated it’s handy to make a unified overview picture.  I think I’ll keep it.
Still trying to get the right balance of planning, action and tracking.