Still Not Getting It

I understand and applaud the changes to Prioritized Tasklists and Project Folders but after several hours of fussing around one way and then the other, I’m still not getting whether I should use one or the other or both. And if both, how. I manage a portfolio of over 40 projects with sometimes dozens of tasks within each. I have a core team of 10 people that report to me and several vendors that provide services.

The basic idea is that you want to organize in the Folders, and then prioritize in the Tasklists.

Without knowing exactly how your projects are structured, here is my suggestion:
Model your projects in ‘Project Folders’ and your execution in ‘Prioritized Tasklists’.

For example, lets say you have two projects for two clients:

• Branding for MegaMegaCorp
  • Come up with new ideas
  • Show them to MMC
  • Deliver final product
• Redesign website for TinyTinyShop
  • Meet at coffee shop
  • Show them the new site

Ok, so here are two projects. Now I would suggest organizing the work you want to do in Tasklists. For example lets say that you just want to break your work down by Quarter.

• Q1
  • Come up with new ideas
  • Show them to MMC
• Q2
  • Meet at coffee shop
• Q3
  • Deliver final product
  • Show them the new site

Does that sound feasible?

Adam,
One of the problems with the organization you show above is that it assumes that the two projects don’t share developers or that the two project will occur in serially. If the “Deliver final product” and “Meet at coffee shop” tasks are performed by developer Sarah but “Meet at coffee shop” is higher priority then this project structure doesn’t work. An alternate approach might be to not put the Branding and Redesign task names in the prioritized list but use those in the folder view. This is one issue I ran into early on. For our development the projects generally don’t want to exist in the prioritized list but instead in the folder list.

The other issue that rkoran might be having is with outside services. LP doesn’t really provide a good way to model outside services. If the outside service is scheduled as a 20 day task assigned to a developer then that developer is unavailable for those 20 days. Since this is an outside service the developer won’t be spending any time on the task although they may be the responsible party for the task. If you create a virtual user to stand in for the outside vendor then the project manager can’t mark progress against the task and the automatic progress doesn’t occur. Instead the project manager (or someone) needs to manually adjust the task duration which is a tedious and error prone solution. One could create a task that takes almost no time and set a delay start date but that only works if your outside vendor will absolutely deliver on schedule and you don’t need to put in a range.

Good points Steve. I should be extra clear that the first breakdown was by Folder, and the second breakdown was by Tasklist, so we are actually suggesting the same thing ;)

As to modeling outside services, that’s a very valid point. I think there is still some thought to be done on our part about how to properly model this as you’re correct, an outside vendor is the perfect candidate for autotrack, especially on larger projects.

You actually did have a perfect way to model outside vendors using virtual users. For my outside vendors I created virtual users and assigned them to the tasks. The estimate I entered was the based on there delivery commitment to me. Sometimes they would provide an estimate range, other times I would take their delivery date and apply my own range. Then I just let everything auto-track. I was very disappointed when you changed this behavior with virtual users and it has caused me major difficulties since I have several outside vendors that directly impact my projects (localization, hardware builds, etc) and I must now manually adjust the estimates and not charge progress against it. If I forget to do so my schedule gets out of whack.

I also used virtual users to stand in for internal tasks that require no developer time but required time such as automated testing. I would have my QA person assigned for an hour to set up the test, the virtual user assigned to the 1 or 2 days it takes for the test to run and then put a dependency on the completion of the test for items that require the tests to be run. This worked great because the QA person could still be scheduled for other tasks such an manual testing and this work would overlap nicely with the automated task.

Loosing this feature almost caused me to stop using LP because I can no longer model outside vendors or the automated tasks easily.

This relates to your discussion on folders and prioritized tasks lists.

After several hours of reading posts, documentation and thinking, I think I have my head around it.

Folders are for sorting things conceptually. So the projects is broken down into its parts (eg new product could be broken down into sub folders like “development”, “testing”, “marketing”, “finances” etc). These parts are NOT related to time. They are not related to WHEN an item will occur. They are only conceptual differentiators. In the same vein, folders can be broken down to sub-folders. So “finances” could be broken down to an “expenses” and a “revenue” folder.

Prioritized tasklists on the other hand are related to time. So, “Urgent”, “Top Priority” and “Someday maybe” make sense because they categorise the importance of each task when it comes to actually DOING the work. (In contrast, folders are there to break down the work conceptually and do not relate to doing it).

Then you just put your most important tasks first in the prioritised tasklist

Potentially, tasklists could be phases of a project eg: Phase1-Research, Phase2-Development etc BUT this only works when a project is done serially. In many cases, this will not work, so I think it’s simplest to use urgency-related labels for this reason.

(BTW, using months for prioritised task lists seems illogical as at the end of the month, you just transfer from one month to the next.)

So here is my question: Why do you have the option to include prioritised task lists in folders? It seems this is mixing things up. Based on my understanding you should have sub-folders in folders.

Please clarify.

Many thanks
Daniel

PS I have a team of 5 and I’m thinking of switching to you guys

You got it.

Re: the question, do you mean “Why do you not have the option to include prioritized tasklists in folders?” Are you looking for a view with mixed folders and tasklists?

Thanks Charles, my mistake.

Prioritized tasklists are not allowed in folders. All good. Thanks.

@stevew – hi, we’ve heard you on the virtual member issue. You’ve used them in a way we did not anticipate.

In the next release (Oct ‘08), these should again work the way you want. As long as there is one paid seat, virtual members will be trackable. Moving forward, the gap between what can be accomplished with virtual members and full members will get wider since we are designing the collaboration features around full memberships.

Best, Charles.

Charles, you just made my day. I have no problem losing collaboration with virtual members since they don’t exist. I don’t think it would be a problem to lose the collaborate tab. As I stated in an email to LP I’d be fine with virtual users that can’t have progress marked against them, they only auto-update. If I have information that needs to be tracked I’d place that information on the task of the real person that is responsible for the outside delivery.
BTW, it’s October so I guess we’ll be seeing this, multi-select and ??? soon.

We are still on track for a release in the back half of October.

Multi-select is killer. It works just like an app should – Shift+Click, Ctrl+Click, etc. Of course what would multi-select be with out a little new right-click support to go with it. We also were able to get in some selection performance enhancements.

We’re also beefing up email integration. Our team has been going nuts over the new ability to create tasks by sending email; it’s so quick. For example I snagged a bunch of screenshots into an Outlook mail window the other day, added some text around them and sent it to LP with an owner assignment and estimate and poof, there it was in the right Project Folder and Tasklist with all the files attached to the task, the text in the detailed description and the pictures embedded in all the right places.

I am finding the waiting time to load things a bit annoying… it’s usually 2-3 seconds… can that be improved?

Yes, we have a long list of things we can do to improve performance and will be rolling enhancements out with each release including the next one in a few weeks.

If you have long lists of projects and tasks, one of the best things you can do to improve performance is work with a smaller section of the plan at a time. If you use the tree structure (Project Folders and/or Prioritized Tasklists), you can filter down to look at one branch at a time. Click on a container and click the “select” link above the filter bar. Click on “reset” to quickly get back to a neutral state.

If you are using Internet Explorer, you might want to switch to Firefox or Google Chrome, they are much faster.

dddobos: We’re doing performance work every release, so some things should be noticeably faster. Selecting items for instance should be much faster in the next release.

The problem comes down to the amount of data we send back.

In general, I find that filtering your view will help a lot, looking at the entire list of tasks all at once will typically force us to send back a lot of data.

I am impressed that you actually respond to customer feedback at the speed that you do. That is rare and much appreciated. Thanks will try out your tips.