If a user logs in for the first time and all they see is a blank screen as there is no information, then they may not realise the full potential of the application. To tackle, this, I am implementing 3 methods to help manage this

1. Making sure that on any page which has user defined data, it first checks if there is any data and if not, it will show some instructions on how to get started or use that partilular screen, so in the files section, it would show you how to add files, organize them etc. There may alos be a screenshot of how it would look once full populated
2. Create a first time setup wizard which they will be taken to after registering. This will allow them to easily add users, clients and projects in bulk at the very beginning. Although it will be possible to skip this step and come back to it later should they wish
3. Allow users to import a sample project which will give them a sandbox like environment with sample users, clients and projects populated with tasks, milestones, tickets etc

As the designer and developer behind the application, it is hard for me to appreciate how real users will interact with the system when it’s in it’s blank state as even when I enter the application in a blank state (which is a small amount of time in comparison to when it’s full of data) I still know how the application should be used. The only way to find out for real if the application will work well when in the blank state is to get real users to test it, which is what the now 190 beta testers will be doing next week

What sort of projects do you normally work on? What size team, what roles are you, do you have a dedicated PM?

There is a PM, sometimes several. Simple banner ads, emails to full sites

How often do you review the project? What’s involved in a review?

Constant, would liek if there was something built in, email reminders. Too busy. Where up to

Who doing what, how to react to problems, reschedule

What’s the “average” length of a project? Do they vary a lot? Lots of concurrent projects and if so, are they linked?

How many points of contact do you normally have within the client? Are they computer literate?

2-3, just the PM

Do you allow everyone within a project to communicate with the client, or just the PM?

What methodology do you use? Do you always use the same or vary based on client/project?

No methodology as such. Try to push some through, doesn’t always work, react to client needs. Try tomplan

Ideal

Plan, code, deploy, feedback, amend, deploy live

What PMS do you currently use? Why? What are the key strengths and weaknesses?

Active collab

• Self hosted
• Ticket
• Small individual jobs
• cIient is th ptoject

Thoughts on the following areas:

Messages

• try to keep in active collab – sends out emails
• everything via the ticket system
• ticket summary = brief
• email into the system

Milestones

• tickets lead to milestone in ideal world
• Look at omni focus and things
• Good to create milestones from tasks after project defined

Tasks

• List of tasks shoved in tickets

Tickets

• Status – traffic lights – amber means waiting for action
• Make creation of ticket as easy as possible

File sharing

Time tracking

• Bill by project
• Stopclock good idea but might not be accurate
• Desktop/air widgets
• 15 minute increments
• Estimated hours vs actual
• Track time spent per day so can spot gaps
• Shift jobs around

Project health

• Good idea
• Woild only work with project management system

Use addons

Cross referenced resources

Stopwatch for time tracking

Ability to undo

• Time lapse, only undo within X minutes
• Make changes but not delete
• Only let PM delete if other stuff builds on it

Version documents and compare them

Integration with external systems

Project mesh instead of stand alone or nested

• Complicated
• Will it be used
• Stumbling block for smaller organizations
• Should be user settable
• Milestones, just midafternoon, quater day
• No
• As long as it’s easy to update
• Some sort of wizard or background
• BC has had outages – lots of small ones

What level of control do you need to time related data? Minute, 15 minutes, hour, day

Would you trust a system you can’t install locally or would you prefer SaaS

Any other thoughts or comments?

Other points talked about after the interview

EE integration so you can manage tasks within the CMS you’re working on – He mentioned it for his, but good idea for mine

Creating a project should be really easy, otherwise we use tickets for everything

I will be building the application using PHP, a dynamic language used for creating interactive websites. Other options included Ruby, Java and Python, but I will use PHP as it’s incredibly powerful and I’m very familiar and comfortable with it.

I will also need a web server to run the application on. For this I will be using Apache, which is the leading, open source web server, which can run PHP applications. Instead of installing this and PHP myself, I will be using the all in one XAMPP bundle, which comes with Apache, PHP, MySQL and PHPMyAdmin.

MySQL is an open source relational database management system and PHPMyAdmin is an open source front end which allows me to easily manage the database, create tables etc without having to use the command line interface.

Frameworks

I will be using the CodeIgniter PHP framework. CodeIgniter is a light weight MVC framework, unlike CakePHP, Symphony etc, which are more fully featured, but much slower (some benchmarks show they’re up to 3 times slower in a simple site). The MVC design pattered used by CodeIgniter separates the Models (data access), Views (rendered UI) and Controllers (logic between models and views). This makes the code much easier to manage, as you don’t have embedded database queries in your views etc.

It also provides a light weight implementation of the Active Record pattern, which is a database abstraction layer.

I will also be using some JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery, although this is yet to be confirmed.

Editors and IDEs

I will primarily be using the open source Eclipse IDE. Eclipse was originally a Java IDE, but by using the PDT (PHP Developer Tools) plug-in, it provides much the same functionality for PHP as it does for Java, including projects, auto completion, syntax colouring, templates/snippets, auto indent and code folding, errors/warnings, debugging, declaration traversal and more. I will also be using Notepad++ which is a powerful Notepad replacement, and has full syntax colouring, auto indentation and folding, text snippets (via a plug-in) and limited auto complete. This will be used for quick edits, when all the functionality of Eclipse isn’t needed.

Version Control

Version control is essential in any project, even in a single user project. I will be using Subversion from Tigris with the Tortoise SVN shell extension which makes it even easier to manage repositories, without having to use the command line interface.

I hope you enjoy following my progress and encourage you to provide feedback throughout the process.