Working to determine the Ordinal Risk Ranking (Borda) for a flying machine IMP/IMS for a client. Came across some needed attributes of a collaborative project management environment. For example
- Project Management – Coordinating budgets, personnel, schedule, and products to meet requirements and mitigate risks
- Product Management – Transferring, storing, translating, and configuring within the context of a product breakdown structure that spans all levels of a program
- Process Management – Defining workflows, enabling approvals and concurrence, changing a products status, and notifying participants via e-mail
- Archiving – Aggregating designs, software, and data files into configurations and or compressing collections into files with indices and product descriptions
- Collaboration – Capturing comments, markups, revisions, discussions, and teleconference support
- Searching and Filtering – Finding information via key words, synonyms, and context within indices, product structures, and semantic information models
- Report Generation – Producing tables, spreadsheets, schedules, and diagrams that present data and relationships among people, products, and processes
- Information synthesis – Integrating data from multiple sources, plotting data, creating visualizations, and displaying results via portals and dashboards
When someone speaks of using light weight web tools (Web 2.0), email, twitter, and IM for managing projects, ask if the processes of project management can be supported in that way?
Now most projects don't have 1,000's of requirements. Ops, I forgot about Enterprise class software projects, large construction, organization change, commercial software intensive products, and things like that. OK, most project in the "long tail" paradigm probably have 100's or maybe even dozen's of requirements. Bet you the Google Phone has a 5,00 requirements in the end.
So if the requirements population becomes more than can be handled in an email, then something other that talking to each other through a 128 character pipe and collecting emails to guide the work of distributed teams, then more thought is needed to actually "manage" the project in the absence of any simple and simple minded tools.
