The beginnings of my 'untitled' Project Management and Tasking project

06/25/2009 02:59 PM by Chris Toohey

One of the latest projects that I'm working on is something that I absolutely need: a simple yet effective Project Management and Tasking application.

I've decided to try to make this process as public as possible in an effort to drive away all of my readership to show you an example of ground-up development for new projects.

For example, I've posted the following two snapshots of my notepad entries based on customer meetings that I've had to gather requirements which establish a phase 1 and phase 2 run of napkin development for said project (shown respectively):

Yeah... you really can't see much. But it's not the particular content that I really wanted to share but the overall process.

Thankfully, the customer is all for my sharing this project with the overall community (minus their specific extended-functionality requests, of course), and provided I can get this completed in a timely manner I'll coordinate with the OpenNTF groups and get this online for a download.

I plan on starting development on this project after this weekend, where I'm wrapping up one post-due project and my Domino Java Ajax Proxy wiki article (and example application download)... so stay tuned!

... ok, I'll share a few basic features and functionality that I'm looking to add:

I want to create a fluid multi-client UX, which means using the UI that I played around with a few weeks back to mirror the Facebook UX in a Lotus Notes Client application. That being said, I'm writing this for the Lotus Notes Client, Wap/Mobile browser clients, and eventually a Web Browser client. Silly order you may say, but the fat client and mobile clients were the big requirements for this one... as the Web Browser client is really something that's a nice to have.

As for the functionality in the application itself, each Project will act as a single NotesDocument, which each Task a Response NotesDocument. A Task can have a dependant Task, which will allow you to properly weigh assignee workload across all projects as well as pinpoint potential delivery delays.

Each Task will also act as a milestone within the overall Project, so each Task is weighted against an overall 100% completion rate with completed milestone percentages rolling up to the Parent Project NotesDocument. ... hopefully that makes sense!

So anything else that you'd like to see in this application? Time provided, I'd love to get some click-to-export functionality that will allow you to take the content into Excel, Symphony, Open Office, or even Microsoft Project.