Curt Doolittle

Form: Project Update

  • OVERSING: CONFUSING MYSELF You can: 1) Schedule Work. Using the Gantt chart or T

    OVERSING: CONFUSING MYSELF

    You can:

    1) Schedule Work. Using the Gantt chart or Timeline.

    2) Soft Book People. Depending upon, or independent of schedule using the Reservations Panel

    3) Hard Book People. Depending upon, or independent of schedule using the Reservations Panel.

    Keeping in mind that:

    – The Schedule’d times DO MOVE automatically.

    – Bookings (Reservations/Appointments) Do NOT MOVE.

    Ergo you schedule out in the future, soft book and hard book as time approaches.

    Now, what are we trying to control for?

    1 – we want to know demand out into the future (the schedule)

    2 – we want to allow PM’s to reserve department, role and individuals.

    3 – but we want to prevent scheduling but not using them.

    You can forecast using the schedule (Gantt and Timeline)

    An admin or operations person can approve the forecast.

    -or-

    You can Reserve people using the Reservations System.

    Individuals can accept or reject reservations.

    You can run Tasks, Tickets, Jobs/WorkOrders, Agile/Kanban, WBS projects.

    You can run not just tech but strategy, hr, career, etc.

    You can schedule people against the project or deliverable

    You can schedule people against stories

    You can schedule people against tasks

    You can schedule and ignore booking.

    You can book and ignore scheduling.

    You can mix booking and scheduling.

    We want to preserve a history of the forecasts by week, and there is no consequence to volatility. it’s just in formation.

    –and–

    We want to preserve a history of changes in reservations.

    Because this imposes a cost of lost opportunity if not monitored carefully.

    So when we save a forecast, what are we saving?

    Weekly by Program (Project) as in the schedule.

    Weekly by Program (Project) as in the bookings.

    But how do we compare these against actuals?

    Well, bookings have to be closed. So we know bookings.

    We know hours total recorded…

    So we just use both :

    Scheduled – Actual

    AND

    Booked vs Recorded against booked?

    I mean, that’s all we can do right?

    ( Eric Adams feedback please )

    Source date (UTC): 2016-03-25 12:15:00 UTC

  • OVERSING Writing Forecasting section today. Tried yesterday. Should have taken t

    OVERSING

    Writing Forecasting section today. Tried yesterday. Should have taken the day off and just slept. I was useless.

    Today it’s going well, but it makes me realize that it’s a science when you’re trying to accommodate every possible method of getting work done.

    By the time I hit the final revision it’ll be a lesson in running a business. lol. Killing me.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-03-25 07:38:00 UTC

  • OVERSING UPDATE Still headed toward an (alpha) early beta the end of the month.

    OVERSING UPDATE

    Still headed toward an (alpha) early beta the end of the month. Although I have reservations, and am skeptical, it’s still looks possible assuming a lot comes together next week.

    The main issue that I see is whether we can fix the Agenda panels, the forecasting, and whether we can make progress showing the appointments. I think that’s another month of work myself.

    And the lack of updates by websockets in some places is … noticeable.

    After that another 60 days of annoying little stuff while we’re in beta and we should be ready to start taking money.

    ON DOCUMENTATION

    Yesterday I got through all of the Workspace UI that I can do. Today I’ll work on Forecasting (reserving time, and measuring forecasting performance).

    Next I have to work on the how-to sections. (which is more natural to write really)

    Then after that the advanced issues. It’s a very time consuming process. The app is enormous and there are multiple ways of doing almost everything.

    ON FEDERATION

    Kirill got the work done much faster than I’d ever imagined. Now it’s all the billing, and data sync.

    So you will be able to buy an instance (sort of how slack does it) and switch between instances.

    ON REPORTS

    I haven’t seen progress on reports. Alexey tends to do big updates. I’ll hopefully get some information on Friday.

    ON RESOURCING AND FINANCIAL PROCESSING

    Resourcing, Forecasting, Period and Financial processing all have sufficient nits in them that they’re just not ready.

    So we’ll soldier onward. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2016-03-24 02:36:00 UTC

  • DOCUMENTATION: OK. I will finish (Or try to finish) the Scheduling, Forecasting,

    DOCUMENTATION:

    OK. I will finish (Or try to finish) the Scheduling, Forecasting, Time entry and Time Card Submission processes today. But my allergies are killing me this morning, so that seems like a lot to get done.

    If I get through them, the I just have to do the Pages/Tabs, and in most cases I will have covered the main features for most users.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-03-21 04:13:00 UTC

  • OVERSING UPDATE. Kirill has federation working. Meaning that you log into the ce

    OVERSING UPDATE.

    Kirill has federation working. Meaning that you log into the central database ( Like Facebook) and then if you want your own instance you buy it in app. And switch between them as desired. We then propagate all your reputation stats to your central profile. The public system does not have monetary or financial features available but you can still run projects.

    He is finishing up the websocket and queue modifications. Then he will hook up the payment system.

    After that we have a bunch of usability issues that I have found while writing the documentation. And we have the one serious issue: including appointments on the Gantt chart. And the schedule panel just needs some fine work.

    I found one today that killed me: if you enter time on a task, it adds it at the current moment.

    You would expect that if you added time against an appointment that it would enter it during the appointment time.

    But nope. It also adds it at the current moment.

    Sigh.

    There are four ways of adding time.

    1) just like leaving a fb post on a task ( there are many types of tasks)

    2) same except on an appointment.

    3) on your agenda.( I have given plenty of thought to cutting this and still might.)

    4) by sort of command line. You just type it on your wall like text. And Oversing is smart enough to figure it out.

    Basically if you can see something and you can assign yourself to it the. You can book time against it.

    Cool.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-03-17 07:21:00 UTC

  • OVERSING UPDATE walking thru the source. It’s elegant. Clean. Spartan even. Yet

    OVERSING UPDATE

    walking thru the source.

    It’s elegant. Clean. Spartan even.

    Yet readable.

    Still finding a few minor usability issues, mostly javascript related.

    But almost done with the documentation of the workspace.

    Then on to the pages. AND THE 50 DIFFERENT TABS I have to document.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-03-13 10:49:00 UTC

  • OVERSING BETA LIVE ON MARCH 31st. We met today and decided that Alexey will fini

    OVERSING BETA LIVE ON MARCH 31st.

    We met today and decided that Alexey will finish the reports while Kirill will make the changes necessary for federating databases. What does that mean? Well, it means that some data, like Skill currency and bank lists, is stored in the central database, and other data is stored in each customer’s database.

    We have created the beta instance, and I have the lucky job of creating the initial workflows and organizational structure.

    I think it’s tight for end of the month. But we will just have to make it.

    But if if customers have to choose between Oversing and Jira it’s pretty easy to choose Oversing.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-03-07 10:30:00 UTC

  • I am behind on posting to the site because of business consuming my time. I will

    I am behind on posting to the site because of business consuming my time. I will catch up. No I am not in favor of federalism.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-03-06 21:10:05 UTC

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  • OVERSING THOUGHTS Once Kirill has a vacation, I have to revisit the Responsibili

    OVERSING THOUGHTS

    Once Kirill has a vacation, I have to revisit the Responsibiliities / Inbox issue.

    I really don’t see why we can’t incorporate that view into the Tasks Panel, and use the same workspace filters. From the user’s perspective it’s just more ‘stuff to do’.

    Now, the basis of the responsibilities/inbox panel is workflow responsibility rather than task assignment. But from the user’s perspective I still want to filter all those responsibilieis using the same criteria as tasks, with the only difference being that I want to see the workflow view (mostly NOT for tasks). And I don’t see why I can’t filter the workflow permissions just like I filter the assignments and ownership.

    Because I want ONE list panel like that if I’m a user. I just feel like this panel throws off the model.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-03-04 09:00:00 UTC

  • OVERSING UPDATE Revising the update because it turns out my concern over permiss

    OVERSING UPDATE

    Revising the update because it turns out my concern over permissions on workflows is incorrect. Why? Because it’s not uncommon for the devs to be smarter than I am. 🙂

    The organizational workflows (stuff in the organization) are governed by the Access Role permissions and you change them via the operations menu. The Task workflows (stuff within programs and projects) are governed by the program administration permission, and you change them as part of program->settings->Workflows.

    So workflow-specific permissions are a ‘nice to have’ not a necessity. Why? well, when you create a new object in oversing, it looks through your org tree and takes the closest one. I would like this to be permission driven so that different groups in the same organization would ‘find’ different system workflows. We also have ‘weights’ that we can apply to these workflows but we haven’t exposed that in the UI yet. I want to see if we can do without it by using permissions.

    REMAINING OPEN ISSUES IN PRIORITY ORDER

    2) (EASY) Drag and Drop to move to Schedule State / Right Click to Schedule State (long standing issue. Always seems to get moved to lower priority. But it’s necessary.) We had quite a bit of debate over this because we don’t want the schedule state to be invasive or to add complexity since it isn’t necessary. So we decided on a compromise, and that is that we separate out the scheduling features into their own ‘block’ on the Tasks panel, and we don’t integrate the scheduling sub-phase into the Main Sequence: Backlog, To-Do(Active), Done.

    7) (EASY) Still missing ability to select for organizations and display Program Statistics in the Tasks Panel. All tasks roll up to parent tasks. And yes, we flatten the data so that we aren’t querying hierarchies all the time. That means that we can show just the Program, project, or deliverable ‘rows’ and that they will reflect the data underneath them without requiring that we display all rows. So, in the tasks view you can easily see a worldwide operation’s active programs and report on them without having to expose the detail of each program.

    6) (EASY) Minor Fixes to Forecasting and Responsibilities. (forecasts should be outer-joined on operational periods, so that we know what’s there and what’s missing) (responsibilities are your ‘inbox’ for workflow activity. and we need some minor tweaks to the table view.) Note: In the future, this panel will switch between email and responsibilities when we add email integration.)

    3) (PAINFUL AND TIME CONSUMING) Display Appointments on the Gantt Chart. (long standing issue) (It’s hard to know what resourcing needs your attention without this feature. We are saving this for last because we find working with this bit of source code time consuming.)

    4) (TIME CONSUMING) Cascading changes to the schedule when we delete dependencies are still not working correctly. I am not sure why this remains an issue.

    5) (TIME CONSUMING) Add the accounting,payroll,operational period properties and functions. This is technically the ‘last feature’, because all it does is allow you to configure the lifecycle of when you allow submissions of different financial activity, and when you post and close it. I have no estimate on this but I suspect it’s a three week effort at the outside. I’m worried that the number of transaction touch points is high, and that it’s hard to test, so that is why despite being fairly simple (creating events), I am cautious about time.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-03-04 07:01:00 UTC