I’m going to a workshop on project management today; one of the perks of being faculty/staff at KU. I’ve felt a lot of internal pressure to become better at this craft and, while I don’t expect this workshop to cure any inadequacies I have in this department, I hope to get a few tips on how to move forward.
One big hump I’ve struggled to get over is software for managing this stuff. Microsoft Project is only an option if I boot it up in Parallels, but I’d rather not have to deal with its complexities. Basecamp and ActiveCollab are a little closer to what I’m after, not only in the simplicity area but also in the collaboration department, but I have a feeling getting work to pay for the former would be a pain, and it looks like the latter is sadly taking a commercial route as well. That’s too bad–its peers on Freshmeat tend to not be the user-friendliest solutions.
I suppose I could try writing one for myself–I actually did so, unknowingly, about ten years ago. In retrospect it worked pretty well–it kept track of projects, team members, and notes. Nothing fancy–some Perl CGIs, but the organization I wrote it for used it in some permutation for quite some time. Seeing as how many Web 2.0 project management startups there already are, and how many of them are written in Rails, such a task shouldn’t be that hard, right?
In the meantime, Dreamhost offers a one-click install for ActiveCollab, at least while it’s still open source, and I’ve set it up try to establish a little order in my life.
