Category: Web Design

For those working in digital agencies (and i reckon similar for many other industries) will know the pain about filling in time sheets, keeping track of multiple projects, working under tight timelines and the other pains revolving around keeping all the balls in the air while having the sanity to give the best you possibility can with a clear head.

One of the ideal way I initially envisioned was just to use a tool. An online collaborative project management tool such as Basecamp (as there is simply just too much hype around it), especially when the fairy tale story of how a web design company became a web2.0 product based company. So cool right? I mean everyone in the team should religiously open up the cool online collaborative tool and update it right? Its really not difficult right? But trust me, its still a pain to do paper work no matter how sexy the paper is.

So should such project management be centralised (ie. one person updates everything) or decentralised (ie. everyone does their part and update their own bit)?

Before we go into any further thinking, lets have a look at the following:

• Advertising Agency’s Traffic role (the person who says who does what when. not totally relevant, but i just wanted to share this role. :p)
• Microsoft Labs’s Productivity Future Vision (yes i think its possible in the future.)
• www.thebigpic.org (a simple yet visually intuitive project management tool. not extremely powerful though.)

Google Calendar Orgy

I’m thinking using the Schedule resources via Google Calendar method might work. This is how i think it can work:

• Each project has a calendar. So the calendar represents the projects & the events in that calendar lines up to become like a project schedule, you can even say its somewhat like a gantt chart, but in a calendar format.
• Each resource (person) has a calendar. So this calendar represents the person’s daily schedule and the special thing about these calendars is that they auto-accept invitations.

So lets take a normal project for example. It has the following stages:

1. Plan (wk 1 – 4)
2. Design (wk 5 – 8)
3. Build (wk 9 – 12)
4. Launch (wk 13 – 14)

So we open the project calendar and create these “events” or “tasks” : Plan, Design, Build and Launch. Now each of these “tasks” will need resources to “action” on them, so we “invite” the necessary “resources”. As these “resources” auto accepts the invitation, they are then pegged as allocated resources for these project task.

So now the project manager / traffic person will set up all the project tasks and allocate all these tasks to the neccessary resources.

As Google Calendars can be shared and accessed via feeds, the following can be done.

• Clients : subscribes to their own project calendar to understand the most updated project timeline and tasks scheduled for their project.
• Resources : subscribes to his own resource calendar to understand the tasks scheduled ahead for him / her.
• Project Manager : subscribes to all the projects he / she is managing.
• Traffic : subscribes to all resources calendars to understand the resourcing plan weeks / months ahead and to assign tasks to resources.
• Bosses : subscribes selectively to what they would like to know.

So if you are still with me, i believe its not hard to imagine how this sounds very workable in theory. I’m not sure though if it will work out in reality.

So here comes the orgy part. If I’m traffic and in charge of resource planning, then I have to subscribe to everything. Lets take for example if there are 10 projects and 20 resources in the company, i would have 30 calendars! OMG! Just having to view them stacked on top of one another is already… /faint…

So what do you think? workable or not?

I update my online status via Twitterbar, sometimes via the Web, sometimes via TweetDeck. Any of these 3 channels will update both my Twitter and Facebook status. The problems starts when i get @replies via Twitter on Twitter and Facebook comments via Facebook.

So if you can imagine, the mess starts here. Popular sites will only get more popular with tools being built around it as popular sites open up their API and encourage people to innovate and build stuff for them. This means the mess can only get messier when the conversation and interaction grows. This will not only happen to Twitter and Facebook, but for any Web2.0 websites out there that is trying to offer the next essential service or be the next big thing.

I think, this problem might be solved soon and it might be from the recently announced Google Wave.

The wave team started with a few simple and fundamental questions and i simply love the questions.

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

I still remember learning about Data Normalisation in school 10 years ago. So now, its time for Normalisation of Communication Data.

For those who want to know more about Google Wave, read about it on Wired, Webmonkey, TechCrunch,  Mashable, Wikipedia, there are loads of good explination out there.

So its cool we are going back to fundamentals, its cool that the net will soon be experiencing a new rebirth. Its cool that conversations / interactions no matter where they are will eventually be done in a similar fashion while allowing individual websites / services to retain their autonomy. Someone have to lead this revolution, why not Google.

The Tsunami of Google Wave is imminent and i’m so looking forward to it.