On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 12:43 PM, Chris Manly <c...@cornell.edu> wrote: > Hi all, > I'm looking for a tool, and I haven't found it yet. It may or may not > exist, but I figure that if it does, there's a chance someone on this list > has seen it and maybe even used it. > I've recently started a new $JOB, and I am now in the fun position of being > half management/half technical. Which means I need to keep track of and > manage my own tasks and projects, but I also need to at least track the work > of 4-5 other people as well (although they are, for the most part, senior > staff and don't need very detailed tracking). > I've taken a few passes at trying to capture what I call my "radar screen": > all of the "blips" that I need to be aware of and check on regularly. Some > of these are things I need to do, some are things one of my staff is doing > and I just need to make sure it's moving along. Some of them are things > that we're waiting on someone else to do for us before we can begin our > work. > So, in a way it's task management on steroids, but in a way it isn't. I > don't expect my staff to necessarily interact with the tool I'm using, so > I'm not really looking for a group/collaborative task/project management > tool exactly. I've looked at Hiveminder, Redmine, JIRA, RT, as well as a > whole bunch of task management applications that would run locally on my > Mac. Nothing quite seems to fit what I have in mind. > Ideally, I'd like to have something that can report on the stuff that's been > marked "done" over a period of time, so that if I'm called to give a status > report to my management I can readily have at hand not only my own > accomplishments but the group's. > I could probably bend one of the task managers or project management suites > into what I want, but they all feel a bit awkward, like I'm trying to > whittle a square peg to fit an elliptical hole. > Can anyone think of something out there that might fit the bill? I'd be > happy with web-based tools or something I can run locally on my Mac. A > local Windows-only application would be suboptimal, but I wouldn't rule it > out if it was otherwise perfect. > Thanks! > Christopher Manly > c...@cornell.edu
Congrats on the new job. It sounds like you're new to management, and that means you're going to be flexing an entirely new set of skills you probably haven't developed before. It's going to be uncomfortable, and you're going to feel a lot like you're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole (communication lesson: stick with the well known idioms without replacing words with "smarter" ones) until you really get your legs with it. You probably have forgotten what it feels like to develop an entirely new skillset. You've reached the pinnacle of the technical mountain, but you're only at the base of the management one. It sounds like you are describing a ticketing system, and possibly you are finding them difficult to adjust to because you're simply not used to them, or are not used to using them in this way. You need to consider that if all the things out there don't fit what you're thinking of, it could be that what you're thinking of needs to change. This is not a technical problem but a human one, so don't focus on the technology so much. I use a text file for daily task tracking and Jira for reporting. It works well enough, but what's important is that you're able to make sure things are moving forward. Tracking every little detail of how it happened doesn't matter so much. I recommend getting familiar with GTD principles as that will help you very much in tracking the flow of tasks, and also take a look at Tom Limoncelli's "Tom on time" videos which give some great insights on general project tracking for tech people/sysadmins (http://www.tomontime.com/). Again, this isn't a technical problem, and you're very unlikely to find some kind of software that's going to "just work" for everything you want it to do. You need to be willing to change your approach to fit the tools that are available. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
