Brent Sordyl's blog

ProjectLibre – open source project management tool

May 23, 2013 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

open source replacement of Microsoft Project! ProjectLibre was voted open source ‘Project of the Month’ in our first month and is now being used on over 200 countries!!!!! You can join the community today! The ProjectLibre team were the founders of open source software downloaded more than 4 million times around the world. ProjectLibre is a major open source addition as the leading alternative to Microsoft Project. Download Now!!!! The ProjectLibre team has a tremendous focus and passion for project management software. The team has led many of the industries innovations dating from mainframe software to releasing the first web-based project management software. ProjectLibre’s open source solution will accelerate deployments of project management software worldwide. We will be releasing Cloud and Server versions later this year.

(Full Story: http://www.projectlibre.org/ )

gantt, open source, projectmanagement

Duet – Professional Project Management

May 21, 2013 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

It’s simple to set up, easy to use, and makes you more productive. All of your project data – including tasks, files, invoices, and notes – at your fingertips and accessible from anywhere. The full source code of the application (PHP, Javascript) An easy to use installation script Product documentation Support All future updates to the application

(Full Story: http://www.duetapp.com/hn )

projectmanagement

Wingman | Git + GitHub + OS X | Source control shouldn’t be stupid.

November 16, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

The goal of Wingman is to make software version control as natural as writing software itself; no endless amounts of command line flags, no lengthy commands, and no cheat sheets – just bugs, features, release candidates, hotfixes and releases. Wingman lets you make the changes you need to make with zero confusion, then get back to your work, stress free.
Wingman is fully integrated with GitHub, giving you the best possible experience with keeping your projects synchronized between team members, in addition to the benefit of having all of your work backed up 24/7.

(Full Story: Wingman | Git + GitHub + OS X | Source control shouldn’t be stupid.)

app, git, github, gtd, osx, projectmanagement

Programmer Time Translation Table | Passion for Coding

October 19, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Time estimation is hard. Every programmer has an interval where the estimations are realistic. Going below that interval means that the overhead (building, testing checking in code) was overlooked. Going above that interval means that the task is too large to overview.

For junior developers, the interval might even be non existing. They overlook the overhead while on the same time any non-trivial task is too large for them to overview. I’d say that an experienced developer should get anything between 0.5 hours and 24 hours right. Above 24 hours a breakdown is needed. It can be done in the head and then summed to 60 hours by the developer – but even someone experienced need to have manageable chunks to think of.

(Full Story: Programmer Time Translation Table | Passion for Coding)

estimation, projectmanagement

Forget Micromanagement: 12 Team Techniques That Work

June 25, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

1. Keep Up the Weekly Meetings
2. Powerful Project Management Software
3. Set Specific Deliverables
4. Always Share the Big Picture
5. Set Goals Together
6. Keep the Fun Going
7. Run a Results Oriented Company
8. Is It Really Micromanagement?
9. Create Templates
10. Keep the Team Small
11. Vision and Values
12. Set the Destination, Not the Journey

(Full Story: Forget Micromanagement: 12 Team Techniques That Work)

gtd, management, projectmanagement

A Project Management Tool Built By Some Of The Country’s Best Design Firms

June 22, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Unlike similar products from 37signals, the first thing you’ll notice is that 10,000ft is quite nice looking. Every button is presented with the polish and care of a honed consumer product, rather than the undertones of engineer-driven design behind a lot of enterprise products. The interface leans heavily on iconography, from the avatars for each team member–a motif strongly reminiscent of Facebook and LinkedIn–to realtime status updates–a band-aid will identify someone who’s sick, while a road will mark someone as traveling. And scheduling anyone to do anything is as simple as dragging and dropping assignments.

(Full Story: A Project Management Tool Built By Some Of The Country’s Best Design Firms)

projectmanagement

Small teams beat large teams in software development | Atomic Spin

January 12, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

To complete projects of 100,000 equivalent source lines of code (a measure of the size of the project) they found the large teams took 8.92 months, and the small teams took 9.12 months. In other words, the large teams just barely (by a week or so) beat the small teams in finishing the project!

Given that the large teams averaged 32 people and the small teams averaged 4 people, the cost of completing the project a week sooner with the large team is extraordinary: the large teams would have spent $1.8M while the small teams only spent $245k

(Full Story: Small teams beat large teams in software development | Atomic Spin)

agile, projectmanagement

Your IT Project may be riskier than you think

November 2, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

The lessons learned from this successful project were to:
1. Stick to schedule
2. Resist changes to the projects scope
3. Break the project into discrete modules
4. Assemble the right team
5. Prevent turnover among team members
6. Frame the initiative as a business endeavor, not a technical one
7. Focus on a single target – readiness to go live, measuring every activity against it.

(Full Story: Your IT Project may be riskier than you think)

projectmanagement

No More Projects – Chad Fowler

April 22, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Projects are lovely for procrastinators. As soon as you call something a project, you give it permission to not be completed right now.
Events such as the Rails Rumble have shown that it’s possible to finish software projects in two days that might take a corporate development team weeks or months in a normal project scenario. What’s the difference? Do the Rails Rumble participants throw quality out the window? Do their apps suck? Do they avoid testing and cut corners? Yea, sometimes. But so do most corporate development groups. That’s how things are.

(Full Story: No More Projects – Chad Fowler)

projectmanagement