Srcasm

 



While talking with a friend the other day about his current dilemma.  He's trying to roll out a difficult project with multiple people interacting and he has a very short time line.  His question to me was simple, "How would you organize the project?"  I had to take a minute to think about this as it's not as simple as I had originally thought.

 

On one hand, the 'ol pencil and paper method (or the digital form of it) could be a great solution.  Draw out the designs, flows and write out the text on a digital whiteboard of sorts.  Everyone can put their hand into the virtual jar and pull out a piece to work on and update that central repository when they get through their step.  The one major flaw in this model that I see is that there is no organization of ideas.  It's too easy to flip from one piece to another without ever actually completing any of the steps properly.  The advantage to this method is it's visually appealing and it allows for people to get the whole picture of what the project contains.

On the other hand, a tool like Google Spreadsheets or Basecamp could come in handy.  It's organized by project, then to-dos and finally has milestones and whiteboards to keep even more info on the project.  This is great but also has it's ups and downs.  The disadvantage is this format can be too structured.  Some people can't comprehend the number of levels of information that are available in a site like Basecamp.  Combine this listing of info with the whiteboards, attachments and even multiple projects and you could be in over your head in stuff.  The advantage to this method is its pure organizational structure.  Everything can be nested, linked and individually displayed.  This means that if I assign task A to you and task B to me, we won't be drawn away by the shiny pieces of task C as easily.

Both of these methods make for great solutions to project management but I'm sure that there are a million and one ways out there to accomplish this.  How would you do it?  What do you see as some of the pitfalls to tools like Basecamp or things like pencil and paper?