Project Planning in Resource Mint

We started with the concept that we would create/edit Milestones, To-Do Lists and To-Dos in Basecamp and pull these from there, and then do the planning in Resource Mint.

However, this would mean that the user would need to have to open two browser windows (orTabs) with Basecamp and Resource Mint open on them respectively, and toggle between these to create a Project Plan in Resource Mint.

This was getting too cumbersome from users’ daily use perspective.

Change in concepts

We are now building with the concept that we will create  Milestones, To-Do Lists and To-Do Items in Resource Mint, and push these to Basecamp, once the project plan is complete.

What do you feel about this, as users?

More on Constraints/Predecessors

One very important feature that most Project Planning web applications out there miss-out on is the concept of defining Constraints or Predecessors.

MS-Project does this; however, it is far too complex for an average user’s understanding or production use. A couple of months back, while searching desparately for some simple easy-to-use project planning tools, I came across the template (pjm_template.ots) prepared by Open Office volunteers. You can also find the same at: http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/ (WordPress does not allow uploads of .OTS files; so cannot upload the same here).

This was pretty simple to use; all tasks had numbers, and one could assign task numbers in a Predecessor column, for defining constraints or predecessors of that task, which had to finish, for this task to start. This is called the Finish-to-Start relationship in academic Project Management terms.

However, this template had two major drawbacks:

1. It does not have facility to enter Resources (ofcourse one could modify the Macros written here to achieve that)
2. It works for only one-project, and assumes that project teams are working dedicatedly on a single project (this is unrealistic in most small company teams; it is these teams which are the targeted users of Resource Mint)

We have used a similar concept and innovated a more user-friendly way of assigning and removing predecessors to tasks or ‘To-Do Items’ in Basecamp terminology.

See the screenshot below to see what we are building.

Screenshots of the application

Here are some screenshots of the product under development:

This is how the screen for a Detailed Project View, and a single resource’s All Projects View is going to look like.

CONSTRAINTS VIEW

We are working on a way to define constraints on To-Do Items so that if completion of a To-Do gets delayed or starts late, the revised dates of completion of those, and the To-Dos (and thus the Milestones) dependent on those can come up.

The concept basically defines human-readable numbering against all To-Dos and Milestones, so that the Manager could enter those numbers against another To-Do Item or Milestone, thus defining the constraints on commencement of those To-Dos.

I’ve picked up this idea from a free Open Office Project Management template, which I found several months back while desperately searching for an effective Project Management tool.

Here’s the screen concept prepared in Excel: