Project Management

Microsoft Office has gotten a lot of nice and helpful features in the latest version. One of the nice features is virtually unlimited undo capabilities. Unfortunately this feature can also leave some tracks for recipients of your documents – a new tool from Microsoft lets you clean your office documents before further distribution. In contracts, business proposals, press releases and other business documents the trails left by the “usability features” may reveal information which wasn’t meant for public distribution.

While project management often focuses on management of the processes, information management and other work issues, one of the most important areas often overlooked IMHO is the physical environment and how it may improve efficiency of the project workers.

Joel Spolsky just moved is company to a new office and spent some time to figure out how to improve “developer workspaces”.

It quite an interesting read.

I don’t know how many (Internet development) projects I’ve been on, but it’s quite a lot through the years. One thing happening over and over again is that all the ambitious goals of the project isn’t quite reached before the launch – and something is either cut short or not quite as polished as it should have been. Lately I’ve been wondering weather this is the right approach. Many of the things you leave out when the deadline starts getting closer is “the finishing touch” – this is especially true for back-ends and other invisible details everywhere. Last time I changed this site, I didn’t get to write a back-end for “site maintenance” where all those things driven by databases – figuring I could do it later – and loaded the initially needed data into the database. I did never get on to write the backend – instead I got used to maintaining the database contents from a mysql client and moved on to doing other little projects.

I’m sure the concept of pointless meetings is familiar - too many people gathered to discuss some issue but after spending hours together no decision has been reached - only the next meeting with a few more people. Here’s one tool which might help a little.

I should begin by noticing that the idea is not my own - it has been as far as I know been used before. I came across it at the Copenhagen Business School where one of the teachers in Organization told about it (and credited it to Søren T. Lyngsøe A/S). The idea is called the meeting clock and it’s quite simple (just as so many excellent ideas are). The clock doesn’t tell time, it shows how much the meeting cost.