My New Year’s resolution for 2004: “Less talk, more do”. More hands-on software development, less reading about others’ work (proportionally, that is). More half hours on the treadmill and reps with the weights, less dreaming of marathons and a perfectly trimmed waistline. Take things in small manageable chunks, rather than big overwhelming aspirations.
Accomplish, rather than dream. Take a step towards the outcome now, rather than plan the perfect journey and never progress towards the goal.
December 27th, 2003
I spent a lot of time working with Microsoft Project 2000 this week. I’d count myself as an intermediate user, which means I can deal with resources, tasks, Gantt charts, durations, constraints, and the like, but I don’t yet do much with PERT analysis, cost tracking, earned value analysis, or tracking against a project baseline. After spending literally days working on a project plan for a project that has a defined start date and end date, with an extreme (impossible?) amount of stuff to get done in the middle, here’s my take on how Project could have been more useful.
* more than one undo operation – what other Microsoft app only allows one level of undo????
* better help in figuring out circular dependency relationships
* spell-check that highlights the spelling error, rather than pushing me to a task number – showing me a dialog box that lists a task number does me no good. Take me to the offending task and show me the “error”.
* warnings when data gets truncated in text fields: we overloaded the text1 field to include a description of the task so that we could export a WBS dictionary. Project happily and quietly chopped our text.
* show me what’s going to change down the line, in terms of time lines: given that our end date is fixed, I spent a lot of time trying to get things to line up precisely to end on May 28. I didn’t appreciate it when making a change in March for a task that wasn’t critical path pushed out my schedule in May. Wish I could tell Project – hold the beginning _and_ the end constant.
* a how-do-we-fit-all-these-tasks-in template: My wish – I give the beginning and end date, and you make up a story as to how it will all fit in nicely. Options could include lengthening the work day, adding more people, shortening tasks, hiring nuns to offer prayers on our behalf…
December 27th, 2003
