Welcome!  English (US) Language Switcher

Tip: Project management on the cheap

clayton.chu says:

As a senior engineering student, several of my peers and I must design and build a never-been-done-before engineering innovation. In professional engineering circles, this type of project requires critical time and task management. Since we're poor, starving college kids who can't afford Microsoft Project, we decided to all use RTM to help manage our project.

Using groups and shared lists, we can set and prioritize milestone deadlines (papers due, concepts created, etc), and we can all see how these deadlines evolve sub-deadlines (get this CAD drawing complete, run this analysis) and processes. Since we each have different skill sets, I can send a task to my peer (run this simulation on the model I just built and send it back to me), knowing that it'll appear in both his Inbox and the team's Shared List.

Before having this system, teams I was on would constantly set deadlines, only to re-set them that day since nobody remembered the deadline. RTM is definitely a very useful way to manage not just your own life, but group projects too!

Posted at 3:56am on September 3, 2009

chriswitt says:

Sounds great - I don't suppose you would elaborate at all about how your system is set up. Personally, I get a lot out of seeing how someone organized things, whether they used tags or not, what kinds of smartlists were used, etc.

Congrats to you for finding a collaboration tool that works!

Posted 2 years ago

clayton.chu says:

We're all running this Greasemonkey script:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/27614

Rather than employ tagging, this script allows us to visually map out subprojects, subtasks, sub-subtasks, etc - kind of a "poor man's Gantt Chart" so we can map out what subtasks need to be done to meet tasks A, B, and C; which tasks need to be done to meet subproject requirements D, E, and F; etc.

Tags like "TODO FOR ______" are used in order to assign someone to a subtask - so in the hierarchy scheme as shown in the Greasemonkey script, we can also see who is actively working on what subtasks. This way we can quickly see what tasks aren't being worked on so someone can pick it up.

Posted 2 years ago

Log in to post a reply.