Project Management for the Add-In
ideaguy said:
I don't know about you guys, I wish that we have a better way to view the progress of a project, we need a way to view task and appointments and a chronological order and relationship to the main project.
That is the only way to manage and change things around, is there something that I am missing here?
Later
Ideaguy
Absolutely right Ideaguy! The lack of a project-management capability is the Achillies heel of the add-in. This is ostensibly what the long-awaited GTD Binocular was to address, at least in part, but this is not part of the add-in. Of course, the more specific and "coded" a specific project management system is, there is always the risk of losing the generic nature of the GTD methodology, which is one of its strengths - no two individuals have implemented GTD the exact same way!
Perhaps we should begin to build a list of requirements for some type of project management methodology for the add-in (either here on on the NetCentrics support site). I'll start here:
- provide simple project-management template (see Bollinger's excellent project form on this forum) to allow rapid definition of project, related sub-projects, and list of next actions (both dependent and independent next actions ie. actions that must/can occur in sequence or in parallel).
- provide the capability to automatically activate one or more next actions (based on project definition above) once a project-based next action is complete (ie. like the GTD-Police functionality, but automatic)
- allow a 1-button scan (like the Update Task Actions button) that would scan all projects and identify projects for which an enabled next action has not been defined (ie. the project is potentially "stuck" when it needs a defined next action to move it forward). This would simplify the weekly review for those of us with lots of small, granular projects or sub-projects.
- provide a field in the project definition to record whether a project is active, inactive, deferred, delegated, etc. so that next action reviews are skipped as appropriate.
- provide simple project reporting views (active projects, delegated, deferred, etc.)
- in the project definition screen, provide the capability to click-and-drag (or attach) related documents, messages, etc. as project-support resources.
- please feel free to add to this list...
Perhaps several of us could collaborate on a basic behavioural spec for submission to NetCentrics. I would volunteed to maintain the basic requirements document.
Surely their developers are working on some kind of project-oriented functionality for the add-in already...
Regards,
Peter