09.15.99
How to Get things Done
It always feels good to get things done, but it seems to give me a really strong sense of elation to finish a project off.
At work, a number of projects had been stacking up and out of the 5 that are in progress, three have been completed within the past 36 hours.
Nikon, PROdX, and ESCO all have been closed out and shipped. Well, actually there will be nits and picks, I’m sure, but those will be on seperate job tickets. Once the sites and resources are in place, I’ll post the URL’s for everyone to see.
I’m glad so much of this stuff is public, work that I can show to others, rather than items being hidden being firewalls in corporate intranets.
A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was organizing the projects using Acta, a piece of software known as an outliner. Well, I’m happy to report that from the system that we developed has been a stunning success. By keeping up with each line of items to do, writing them down and checking them off, at the end of the project we’ve got a beautiful list, step-by-step of everything that we did on the job.
Using this system, everyone has been keeping up-to-date with all of the projects. Projects have a number of different catagories:
Sales: Projects that the sales people are discussing. Usually these projects are in the concept stage, possibly requiring mock-ups.
In-House: Projects that are internal items. A few of these include print collateral, the web site, the promo CD, etc.
Pre-flight: Projects that have had an intent agreement signed and we are still collecting materials, getting a final estimate together and a final layout of the site.
Live: Thse are sites and projects that are in progress. In the outline we note each step up through the first review. After the first review meeting we walk away with a list of notes for the site. That list gets put directly into the outline where it is the actual list that we work off of, working until the list is done and we’re ready for the next review.
Wrap-Up: Here we make the archive on CD, prepare the deployment of the site, review the project and work out how to make the system better. Now that we have these projects into this stage, we can finally try out this part.
I’m pretty proud of this system. I’ve been the main designer of the outline, drawing from the systems that we had at CMC, New Interactive, and what I developed at OMSI. It’s small, but very flexible. I’m hoping that it will be a good way to start off, then we can migrate to more robust software. I’m pretty optimistic.