Waterfall Web

I have been a phpCollab user for several years, and last week made the switch over to NetOffice.

Why?

One of the main reasons is that phpCollab is still stuck on version 2.4, and has been for along time. Sure, they have a 2.5 in beta, but that’s been in beta for a long time, too. NetOffice have a stable 2.5, a 2.6 beta, and a starting to get some direction for a 3.0 release. Bug fixes seem to be attended to in a reasonable amount of time for an open source project, so we’ve migrated over to the 2.6 release. It features:

• An improved interface
• Time tracking
• Built-in customised reports
• Meetings

I feel that time tracking is the most important addition. With some minor customisations, we will be able to run a billing report so we can send an itemised invoice for each project. We can see how many billable hours have been done each week (and hence measure productivity). We can check each person’s workload based upon estimated hours allocated with each task. Useful stuff.

We’ll get some of these mods together and post them here soon…

(If you haven’t already – see Part One – An Introduction to Project Management)

When dealing with project management for website development, there are really on two things to juggle.

1. Tasks
2. Resources

Sounds simple, right?

Tasks

Tasks are fairly obvious. They are the things you have to do. I have found it useful to group your tasks into phases – it helps to get a better overview of where you are (instead of looking at a great long list of unrelated tasks) and it’s also easier to set up a template of standard tasks that you then simply customise for each job. We generally use the following phases:

1. Planning
2. Content gathering and editing
3. Design
4. Programming
5. Construction/Assembly
6. Testing
7. Post Launch

Tasks near the beginning and end of a website project tend to be repeated, so make a template out of these at least. And look for the things that you generally do in the middle phases, and write these down as well. You can easily customise your list if the individual project warrants it.

Once we have our list of tasks together, we now need to make them happen!

Resources

In project management, resources can be anything from people to equipment to buildings or meeting rooms – anything you need to get the tasks done. Relating back to web design, we’re really only talking about people, or manhours more specifically. Time. If you have 80 hours of tasks to be done, and George has 20 available hours this week and Mildred has 15, it ain’t going to get finished this week!

Another point to consider – people aren’t productive 100% of the time. We’re not robots. So if you employ someone for 38 hours per week, you’re wasting your time allocating them 38 hours worth of tasks. Never going to happen. I work on allocating 4 hours out of every 5. If they happen to get finished earlier than expects, then good! Get a head start on tomorrow’s work. But you need to allow time to get coffee, visit the loo, chat about the movie you saw on the weekend or whatever.

Okay, that’s enough theory. Next installment we’ll start getting our hands dirty!

It’s probably fair to say that most website projects are not managed, they just happen. Do up some designs, slice the graphics and code it up, drop some content in and viola! We have a website!

This might be okay if you’re working on one or two at a time, but when you get to half a dozen or more, you’ll quickly find you need some project management skills.

I’ll be outlining here over the next few posts a method that works for me. I’m always fine tuning it, so it’s by no means perfect, but if you currently have no management system in place at all this will hopefully set you heading in the right direction.

I’ll be referring to phpCollab (as that’s what we use), so it might be a good time to download, install and configure it before we go much further. There’s setup instructions on their website, so I won’t repeat them here.

There’s your homework for now, next time we’ll deal with basic project management principles.