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Project Management Tools
I use several things to help me try to keep my projects organized.
None of them address the whole picture and they all work better
with more discipline (something I wish I had more of). --> 11/3/05: I've recently read David Allen's Getting Things Done. I like his book because it integrates the managing larger projects with day to day tasks nicely. It has good things to say about filing as well. Always a weak point for me. A step beyond Franklin/Covey and the other personal productivity books I've used. Worth a read.
--> 11/3/05: several months ago I started using the X1 desktop search tool. As fast as I can type it shows me all the emails or files with that text in it. I can't imagine life without it now. For my purposes it has two features that make it much better than the free Google desktop search tool: It searches Eudora mail (I still use Eudora as my mail client) and it can search network connected hard drives. Google doesn't do either.
--> 11/3/05: I've recently read David Allen's Getting Things Done and I've adopted his filing system. It's done a world of good for me. Sharing documents with others Projects, by there nature, require lots of people to have common understandings in many areas. A lot of this happens in meetings, but when new people or stakeholders join the effort they need to know what has happened, and the people who were in the meetings need to remind themselves what happened, what was decided. Email doesn't work terribly well for this. It doesn't work at all well for people joining a project. Email also requires each recipient to put the effort into filing the document in their project folders. And then you have to keep track of who got what emails. For projects where I'm sharing documents with others, I have a mapped drive on the intranet. That way the project team can all map the drive and have access to all the project documents just as if they were on the file server. Other people can view the documents on the web. I can set up access control where I need it either using CUWebAuth for web visitors, or file permissions for the mapped drive users. (see an example of this at http://intranet.engr.cornell Creating and documenting shared understandings in meetings Discussion during meetings is the best way to create shared understandings, but it is incredible how different people can interpret the same discussion differently. There are lots of techniques to address this verbally. Things like repeating what you heard back to the speaker, and so on. There is a whole discipline in this area (Negotiation, Group Dynamics, etc.). These don't document the shared understandings however. Also people walk away with their separate understandings from the meeting recorded on their separate notes. Unless formal minutes are taken and reviewed these separate understandings are not reconciled. Photos of whiteboards: To address this I've taken to taking notes on the wall. I write on whiteboards, or easel paper and take pictures to post to the website. I carry a small camera and fresh whiteboard pens with me everywhere. I use White Board Photo to clean up the pictures before I post them. I import the pictures using Paper Port, clean them up with White Board Photo and post them to a sub directory on the mapped drive. (All this can easily be done from within Paper port.) (see http://intranet.engr.cornell Take notes using a laptop and data projector: Whenever possible I take take my laptop and use a data projector in the meeting to take notes. With Red Rover in most conference rooms, I can save the file directly to the mapped drive so every time I save the most recent version is saved to the web. This is an incredibly effective way to keep everyone on the same page (literally). I can bring the conversation back to the point at hand by asking people what I should type to summarize there discussion. Also, once people trust the system they can dispense with the effort of taking their own notes and therefore be more focused on the task at hand. It is a little distracting for me to be facilitating and typing at the same time. Occasionally I get so engrossed in the discussion I forget to type it up. Some people separate the two tasks, but it hasn't been too much of a problem so far.
11/3/05: I've recently started using Results Manager for sweeping up all my tasks from my many mind maps into a master task list. It takes a bit of a commitment to get started but it appears to be paying off. Ask me in 6 months if I'm still working with it. Integrates with Getting Things Done mentioned above. Recommended. Collaborative authoring I haven't figured this one out yet. MS word revision tracking should do this, but I've heard mixed reviews. Adobe Acrobat claims to do this too. There are tools for outlook that will group all emails with associated documents etc., together. So far, I've used rather old fashioned techniques of marking up paper and retyping the edits.
11/3/05: See notes about Results Manager above. Combining Mind Manager and Results manager looks like it will do the trick.
See the campus PM email list page. Some of these pages have really good templates for various aspects of the PM process.
Also the campus runs a two day fundamentals of PM class that I found really informative. Contact Chet Warzynski for more information. I highly recommend that you bring a intact project team to the class. Our intranet team was really productive and produced initial planning documents during the class.
Hope this was helpful, |
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