For a little while now I’ve been playing with new strategies for indexing my UI sketches so they can be easily found/shared. Rifling through my various notebooks is pretty inefficient, and it also makes it difficult to send designs off to someone for feedback.
Here’s a little video detailing my methodology, which includes, Evernote, and Preview with annotations to get the job done. Would love some feedback on my approach, and to hear about what works for you.
Just a quick note, if you’re interested in being notified when kitolab launches, or wish to participate in the closed beta test, please go to www.kitolab.com and sign up. You can also follow @kitolab on Twitter of course.
After weeks of brainstorming, domain searching, forceful premature balding and sleepless nights, I’ve finally decided on a name for my upcoming project management app.
What’s in a name?
For the longest time I was intensely frustrated that I couldn’t find available domain names in the project management realm. Before long I found that I was starting to settle for names that didn’t really mean anything, and were hardly memorable.
Then I started to take a more systematic approach to finding a name. Aside from all the standard naming criteria, I decided that I wanted the name to represent:
More than just tasks. What I’m building is not a to-do list manager, it’s a much more intelligent project management assistant (a lab partner, if you will).
More science than art. Typically, project management is a lot of guess work. I aim to replace much of that guess work with tangible, data-supported analysis.
Simplicity & fun. Ok, it’s not likely that managing projects will ever be “fun”, but if it’s not “painful”, that’s a start.
I try to ask myself this on a fairly regular basis. I feel it keeps me focused on building the right tool for the job, rather than just the shiniest one in the box.
Consequently, the more I’ve thought about this question, the more keep coming back to another question: How long? This seems to be the most prevalent question in project management, and is the basis for nearly every project management decision we make. How long ago did they ask for this? How long will it take to do? How long have you been working on it? How much longer until we’re done? Then, when we’re done, we ask: How long did that take? How much longer is that than we thought it would take?
There are dozens of “how long” questions in project management, and this is simply because managing a project, is managing time. People, budget, service these are all just tangible realizations of time. The distillation of nearly every facet of a project, to its most basic unit, leaves time.
So, it seems clear to me that a tool designed to make project management easier, should place great emphasis on reducing the effort required to answer these “how long” questions. Odd that I’ve yet to see one that does.
Effective project management requires an effective feedback loop—measurements of our past, current and foreseeable future performance. These metrics enable teams to make timely, informed decisions.
Unfortunately, many organizations, if they analyze their projects at all, do so in the form of post-project performance reviews. Reviews are fine, but they have some inherent flaws. The most obvious being that as a review, you’re looking at something after it’s happened—it’s a lagging metric. Continue Reading
