On Monday, April 20, 2015 at 8:06:11 AM UTC-4, DBvc wrote: > > I'm new to MLO and i'm valuating if can fit my actual task/project > workflow. >
Hi, Dario. You are not the first person in your position and you won't be the last. There are a lot of people with pretty similar situations around, some still looking for help in figuring out what to do and others resigned to some uncomfortable compromise. This is just my personal opinion and I really don't know enough about your situation to judge but my take is that you are stuck at the boundary between task management and project management. Task management involves capturing my whole backlog of things that need to be accomplished, organizing them in a way that helps me quickly and easily determine what I am supposed to be doing now, get a short list of useful things to do next, prevents urgent or important things from getting lost, and minimizes the amount of time I spend managing my backlog instead of completing it. It may involve figuring out which things in my backlog are just never going to happen and helping me abandoning them. It may involve keeping track of what's already done. It may involve figuring out what's dependent on what so I don't waste time working on things that are not ready to be completed. It may involve the relationship between my tasks and somebody else's tasks. Project management involves identifying resource pools including resource capacity availability and schedules, planning the allocation of resources to tasks in a way that maximizes productivity, estimating timeframes and resource costs for project completion, budgeting, tracking actuals against plan, adjusting plans to accommodate variances with minimized adverse effect on profitability, and finding early indications of problems with the plan and making appropriate adjustments, and so on. I consider MLO to be the very most powerful and capable task management software available. I do not consider it to be project management software. MLO is such a good task manager that it even includes some rudimentary project management capabilities, maybe even enough to get you and Robert through your day. maybe not, maybe you really need project management software. Wikipedia offers a list of 166 different applications for project management software, maybe one of them would suit you better. I have previous experience with one of them, Microsoft Project. It required some expensive hardware and software, a skilled sysadmin to keep the wheels turning, one to two fulltime team members devoted to ensuring that all the project plans were up to date plus finding and explaining variances. In addition every team member spent around a half hour per day recording what was accomplished, how many hours work remain on each open task, what open dependencies are blocking their progress, and what unplanned tasks occupied their time. It's tempting to try to achieve the high levels of control and documentation that come from fullblown project management but to do it with an inexpensive, easy to use task manager. Some people actually do figure out the compromises necessary to succeed at this. For most, it's like the search for delicious filling food that isn't fattening, or the search for a low-risk high-return investment. Maybe Andrey and the MLO team should invest in making MLO a better project management tool. It has been suggested often by a lot of people, including me. But at this point, I think that would just move them from being the best and most powerful task manager into being a rudimentary, unsophisticated also-ran project management tool. I wouldn't recommend it. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/5d5b51f2-02dc-454b-8a73-317f46bf6f9e%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
