This is just the raw notes from the interview, I’ll write them up properly in the near future
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
