I’ve come to realize that Project Management (capitalized) as it’s typically known is mostly a tool to keep managers looking busy to their superiors. I’m not interested in Gantt charts; I’m interested in communication and seeing what’s gotten accomplished–not what someone promised would be done by now and is now hopelessly off-schedule.
So we’ve begun (actively) using ActiveCollab. I wish there were some sort of stats feature built in so I could tell you how many tasks have been added. And, believe it or not, some of those tasks have already been checked off–I’m a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, at least the method he suggests for writing out tasks, and that’s helped create cross-offable tasks. Granted, there are only two of us using it at the moment, but rolling out slowly isn’t a bad thing.
I’m still disappointed that ActiveCollab is going to a commercial model, but I came to the conclusion that, hey, if it’s worth paying for, work will pay for it. And if not, I’ve got the old open source version until it breaks.
