Project Management System | General | Forum

For my part, despite all my recent complaining about overbearing management techniques and wanting to keep things like, after playing around with Project Open on the above test installation, I really like it.  In particular I have set up a little hierarchy of projects related to OHKLA, which looks like this:

I think being able to have all the required design decision for OHKLA (and obviously the above are not all, just what I set up while playing around) arranged in a hierarchical tree like this, with information relevant to each decision being stored there, is extremely helpful.  I also wouldn't even be averse to us having a brief 3-5 page paper attached to each point in this tree providing an overview of our options.  This would help make our decisions look informed, and it also gives new comers an easy way to find work to do.  We can point them at the project trees and say "If you find a branch of this tree which doesn't yet have a paper outlining our options and the various pros and cons of each, start doing some research and write one!".  Actual design decisions can be made by a vote after everyone reads the paper.

I am not particularly attached to Project Open (I understand there are concerns about RAM requirements, etc.) but I do think it would be good to go with something which is like it, something which can arrange our material in arbitrarily deep tree structures.

Finally, a word of caution to people playing around with PO: The first time I created a project, I set the finishing date (which is annoyingly a requried field, I wonder if this can be turned off by the admin?) to the year 9999 (since our projects will be done when they are done).  DO NOT DO THIS!  Stupidly it makes that project and any operations on it extremely slow.  By the time I had two subprojects ending in 9999 under this project also, things had become completely unusable.  Simply clicking on the project could crash a browser.  It took me a lot of waiting and a lot of patience to delete those projects (i had to dedicate a machine to it).

Rocket-To-The-Moon said:

I see now. The software does look like it has a lot of potential, the only question is can we truly benefit from it. I see no real harm from at least testing it to see if we can derive any use from it. My concern is that some will use it while others will not thust defeating the purpose of having it in the first place.

If it is decided that we want some sort of management solution (and in my opinion we probably should strive to implement this) it will be necessary to enforce its use (something that is contrary to our open model). Ultimately having rigid administrative protocols will prevent people from wanting to join CSTART in the first place. It may be necessary for only certain high level "project leads" to even concern themselves with this aspect of the project.

I can see the upkeep of the database being a sort of "TPS Report" issue where members are nagged to make sure they update their project's status.

We definitely don't want things to end up being an Office Space-esque bureaucratic nightmare, I agree.

I think it would be best if each project, subproject, etc. had designated "representatives", dedicated people who, while not having any technical authority per se, voluntarily take on the responsibility of making sure that the project management back end is kept up to date.  These people would be the main connections between the forums/IRC room and the formal backend of the project.

Hopefully some of the "rank and file" members will be conscientious enough to take part in this too, but for those who aren't, rather than simply yelling at them repeatedly, the project representatives can pick up the slack.

Using the column sorting functions on that table, it looks like there are 3 pieces of software which are open source and have all of the available features: Project.net, Project-Open, and Redmine.  We should probably take a look into the other two.

DenisG said:

Note that I have in mind more product management, not project management.

Could you please clarify a little exactly what you mean by product management?

I am not necessarily opposed to making product management the main criteria in choosing some software here, but I think that project management, of the kind I've seen playing with Project Open, would be a great thing for us to have as well.  Being able to have all our requirements, documents, images, etc. for each project clearly organised in a hierarchical tree will really help to tidy things up.