topic Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project? in BreakPoint

Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

_Bryan — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 17:44:59 GMT

This is not a question about LabVIEW projects in the development environment, but notes for the overall project. I usually end up with an Excel spreadsheet with multiple sheets that eventually get hard to read because there are so many. I use Excel just because it is there and I can type into as well as add screenshots when needed. And then I also end up with a few different Excel files as well that can make it fun to piece all the information together at times.

It works, but I am wondering if there is a better way and how other developers track and organize their projects and notes in general.

Bryan

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

Hooovahh — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 18:43:41 GMT

I use OneNote. You can have a Notebook, and in that notebook is sections, and each section gets a set of pages. So I have Personal Projects notebook, and then each project gets a section, then each section has pages. From an Outlook meeting you can click Meeting Notes, and it will make an entry in a notebook and section, and from there I can take notes too. You can make lists, bullet points, and paste pictures. Not perfect but pretty handy.

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

_Bryan — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 20:29:29 GMT

@Hooovahh wrote:

I use OneNote. You can have a Notebook, and in that notebook is sections, and each section gets a set of pages. So I have Personal Projects notebook, and then each project gets a section, then each section has pages. From an Outlook meeting you can click Meeting Notes, and it will make an entry in a notebook and section, and from there I can take notes too. You can make lists, bullet points, and paste pictures. Not perfect but pretty handy.

Thanks for the information. I was just starting to look at OneNote since I have Office 365 through my company.

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

wiebe@CARYA — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 09:20:10 GMT

We use OneNote, but mostly for lack of alternatives. OneNote is so flexible, and there's no structure at all. So, if all members in a team just keep putting stuff in, a mess is guaranteed. I 'solve' this by using OneNote for reading only, I don't want to add to the chaos. Others have to point out where it is in the OneNote (and where the OneNote is), because there are tabs, lists, scrollbars that are hidden, and I really can't find anything...

We've used Redmine for issue tracking before. I liked that better, but I didn't have to add items. The interface is tedious if you really start using it. The Agile plugin (perpetual license!) did help a lot. Potentially, you can make your own interface, because there's a rest API... The same applies to DevOps.

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

_Bryan — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 14:55:13 GMT

wiebe@CARYA wrote:

We use OneNote, but mostly for lack of alternatives. OneNote is so flexible, and there's no structure at all. So, if all members in a team just keep putting stuff in, a mess is guaranteed. I 'solve' this by using OneNote for reading only, I don't want to add to the chaos. Others have to point out where it is in the OneNote (and where the OneNote is), because there are tabs, lists, scrollbars that are hidden, and I really can't find anything...

We've used Redmine for issue tracking before. I liked that better, but I didn't have to add items. The interface is tedious if you really start using it. The Agile plugin (perpetual license!) did help a lot. Potentially, you can make your own interface, because there's a rest API... The same applies to DevOps.

Thanks for the reply. So far OneNote seems like a lesser evil or at least different enough than Excel to give it a trial run. I am the lone wolf at my company, so I am the only one responsible for the mess. Every now and then the dog needs to learn a new trick.

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

JÞB — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 16:33:08 GMT

No amount of time spent in front of a computer documenting project status is available for actually advancing the status of the project! Worse, it should be obsolete by the time you type it.

That doesn't mean that the PM shouldn't manage the project! But, he should be walking around looking at the teams needs and anticipating problems.

Managers need to have a vision forward.

Way back when I was in the Navy I had a great conversation with my division officer in front of his boss. "Sir, don't come to me with solutions! Providing you with solutions is what the Navy trained me and my men to do. Tell us your problems."

When the Operations boss heard that I was immediately escorted to the Captain's office and ordered to repeat myself. The quote was posted in the wardroom and entered in the ships standing orders .

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

Hooovahh — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 16:58:17 GMT

Okay you just reminded me of another tool that we sorta use for project management, JIRA. It is a web based database tool that can be used in lots of ways. We get test requests all the time, or asked to help out other groups. We ask them to enter a JIRA with the details of the test they need and attach any needed documents. Then my boss assigns the JIRA to someone to work on. The nice thing about this is you can add comments, notes, or other documents as the issue progresses. It really helps to look back months later when someone asks why a test isn't done yet, and you can point to all the setbacks that we were subjected to that were outside of our control. We also use it for maintenance tasks, calibration tasks, basically bug and issue tracking. For a single person it might be overkill but for our team it has cut down on the amount of unnecessary crap we've had to deal with when working with people from outside our group.

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

_Bryan — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 18:00:53 GMT

@JÞB wrote:

No amount of time spent in front of a computer documenting project status is available for actually advancing the status of the project! Worse, it should be obsolete by the time you type it.

That doesn't mean that the PM shouldn't manage the project! But, he should be walking around looking at the teams needs and anticipating problems.

Managers need to have a vision forward.

Way back when I was in the Navy I had a great conversation with my division officer in front of his boss. "Sir, don't come to me with solutions! Providing you with solutions is what the Navy trained me and my men to do. Tell us your problems."

When the Operations boss heard that I was immediately escorted to the Captain's office and ordered to repeat myself. The quote was posted in the wardroom and entered in the ships standing orders .

Thanks for the insight. Not that I really disagree, but how does that address my question? I am just trying to see if there is a better way to do something that could make my life a little easier. Besides, I was telling the forum my problem and looking for solutions. (Sorry I could not help myself. Way back I was in the USMC.)

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

Jacobson-ni — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 18:22:54 GMT

The last project I was working on we were working out of GitHub and we ended up with a pretty extensive wiki page for the repo. It's really easy to edit and the fact that it's living right next to the repo I think makes it more likely to be updated (our tech lead also made it a point to add tasks for updating the wiki when relevant).

We also ended up adding a lot of notes and pictures to issues and even had a "research" tag for some issues where the entire point was to just write down the findings in the issue notes.

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

_Bryan — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 18:32:56 GMT

@Hooovahh wrote:

Okay you just reminded me of another tool that we sorta use for project management, JIRA. It is a web based database tool that can be used in lots of ways. We get test requests all the time, or asked to help out other groups. We ask them to enter a JIRA with the details of the test they need and attach any needed documents. Then my boss assigns the JIRA to someone to work on. The nice thing about this is you can add comments, notes, or other documents as the issue progresses. It really helps to look back months later when someone asks why a test isn't done yet, and you can point to all the setbacks that we were subjected to that were outside of our control. We also use it for maintenance tasks, calibration tasks, basically bug and issue tracking. For a single person it might be overkill but for our team it has cut down on the amount of unnecessary crap we've had to deal with when working with people from outside our group.

I just signed up for the free version of JIRA. It looks interesting and would be a better way to track multiple projects that are always going on. Thank for the heads up!

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

wiebe@CARYA — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 08:30:12 GMT

AFAIK, JIRA, Redmin, DevOps all work similar, and they try to solve the same problems.

OneNote, Wikis, also work pretty similar, as that they're basically open canvasses where you can do whatever you want.

They all do some good, but I don't feel any solution is excelent.

It all reminds me of drawing class diagrams (or documentation in general). You can use a modeling tool like Modelio or Visio, that make you model everything, or use something like DrawIO, that gives you all the freedom.

You can choose to model everything at the expense of having to model everything, or have freedom, and you need to organize everything yourself.

I would like to cherry pick features, landing somewhere in the middle...

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

JÞB — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 17:25:07 GMT

@_Bryan wrote:

@JÞB wrote:

No amount of time spent in front of a computer documenting project status is available for actually advancing the status of the project! Worse, it should be obsolete by the time you type it.

That doesn't mean that the PM shouldn't manage the project! But, he should be walking around looking at the teams needs and anticipating problems.

Managers need to have a vision forward.

Way back when I was in the Navy I had a great conversation with my division officer in front of his boss. "Sir, don't come to me with solutions! Providing you with solutions is what the Navy trained me and my men to do. Tell us your problems."

When the Operations boss heard that I was immediately escorted to the Captain's office and ordered to repeat myself. The quote was posted in the wardroom and entered in the ships standing orders .

Thanks for the insight. Not that I really disagree, but how does that address my question? I am just trying to see if there is a better way to do something that could make my life a little easier. Besides, I was telling the forum my problem and looking for solutions. (Sorry I could not help myself. Way back I was in the USMC.)

Well, I guess I was saying the project tracking is a management quality litmus test. If everyone is worried about tracking the team progress it hampers progress and management spends more resources tracking than empowering their team. If management invests in the team, production takes care of itself and they can spend more time at the bank depositing profit and cutting those bonus checks the team is really interested in.

I wasn't providing a solution. I was defining the problem. I trust you to find a solution!

(You have to spell EVERYTHING out for those jar-heads)

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

_Bryan — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 20:02:31 GMT

@JÞB wrote:

@_Bryan wrote:

@JÞB wrote:

No amount of time spent in front of a computer documenting project status is available for actually advancing the status of the project! Worse, it should be obsolete by the time you type it.

That doesn't mean that the PM shouldn't manage the project! But, he should be walking around looking at the teams needs and anticipating problems.

Managers need to have a vision forward.

Way back when I was in the Navy I had a great conversation with my division officer in front of his boss. "Sir, don't come to me with solutions! Providing you with solutions is what the Navy trained me and my men to do. Tell us your problems."

When the Operations boss heard that I was immediately escorted to the Captain's office and ordered to repeat myself. The quote was posted in the wardroom and entered in the ships standing orders .

Thanks for the insight. Not that I really disagree, but how does that address my question? I am just trying to see if there is a better way to do something that could make my life a little easier. Besides, I was telling the forum my problem and looking for solutions. (Sorry I could not help myself. Way back I was in the USMC.)

Well, I guess I was saying the project tracking is a management quality litmus test. If everyone is worried about tracking the team progress it hampers progress and management spends more resources tracking than empowering their team. If management invests in the team, production takes care of itself and they can spend more time at the bank depositing profit and cutting those bonus checks the team is really interested in.

I wasn't providing a solution. I was defining the problem. I trust you to find a solution!

(You have to spell EVERYTHING out for those jar-heads)

Ha ha.

I guess I should say thanks for telling me what you think my problem was in different words? (It must be a Navy Sea-Daddy thing)😉

These notes are for my own use during the project and not for management to track my progress. My current project is the first of a series of 3 part automated resin mixing stations with a PLC, HMI touch screen, load cell, 5 different servo motors and pumps. So I want to try something besides Excel to track everything I am doing. And I can see where some of the suggestion would actually help me track other ongoing projects as well. Since it looks like I am being my own project manager for myself. I have seen people use Excel to track all kinds of things, but it also looks like a huge time suck to try and keep everything updated and running smoothly.

Bryan

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

Hooovahh — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 20:13:47 GMT

I don't have any experience with it, but I see program managers using Microsoft Project all the time to track deliverables, and delays in things. It seems to help with tasks, and show when one thing is requirement for another, or how timelines shift when one things change.

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

_Bryan — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 20:29:58 GMT

@Hooovahh wrote:

I don't have any experience with it, but I see program managers using Microsoft Project all the time to track deliverables, and delays in things. It seems to help with tasks, and show when one thing is requirement for another, or how timelines shift when one things change.

I checked on Microsoft Project and it was not an option in our Office Suite. I even asked our IT guy if we had any project management software in the company and he said no. But I would hope someone has that type of software in the company. I would guess either he did not understand or they have limited licenses.

Thanks.

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

JÞB — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 21:55:58 GMT

@_Bryan wrote:

@JÞB wrote:

@_Bryan wrote:

@JÞB wrote:

No amount of time spent in front of a computer documenting project status is available for actually advancing the status of the project! Worse, it should be obsolete by the time you type it.

That doesn't mean that the PM shouldn't manage the project! But, he should be walking around looking at the teams needs and anticipating problems.

Managers need to have a vision forward.

Way back when I was in the Navy I had a great conversation with my division officer in front of his boss. "Sir, don't come to me with solutions! Providing you with solutions is what the Navy trained me and my men to do. Tell us your problems."

When the Operations boss heard that I was immediately escorted to the Captain's office and ordered to repeat myself. The quote was posted in the wardroom and entered in the ships standing orders .

Thanks for the insight. Not that I really disagree, but how does that address my question? I am just trying to see if there is a better way to do something that could make my life a little easier. Besides, I was telling the forum my problem and looking for solutions. (Sorry I could not help myself. Way back I was in the USMC.)

Well, I guess I was saying the project tracking is a management quality litmus test. If everyone is worried about tracking the team progress it hampers progress and management spends more resources tracking than empowering their team. If management invests in the team, production takes care of itself and they can spend more time at the bank depositing profit and cutting those bonus checks the team is really interested in.

I wasn't providing a solution. I was defining the problem. I trust you to find a solution!

(You have to spell EVERYTHING out for those jar-heads)

Ha ha.

I guess I should say thanks for telling me what you think my problem was in different words? (It must be a Navy Sea-Daddy thing)😉

These notes are for my own use during the project and not for management to track my progress. My current project is the first of a series of 3 part automated resin mixing stations with a PLC, HMI touch screen, load cell, 5 different servo motors and pumps. So I want to try something besides Excel to track everything I am doing. And I can see where some of the suggestion would actually help me track other ongoing projects as well. Since it looks like I am being my own project manager for myself. I have seen people use Excel to track all kinds of things, but it also looks like a huge time suck to try and keep everything updated and running smoothly.

Bryan

If it's jut you... go old school and use a whiteboard.

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

altenbach — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 21:27:39 GMT

@JÞB wrote:
If it's jut you... go old school and use a whiteboard.

You are way too young! When I grew up, there were no whiteboards. Old school would be a flat slate stone and chalk. Even older school would be to carve on a clay tablet. 😄

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

wiebe@CARYA — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 08:49:28 GMT

@Hooovahh wrote:

I don't have any experience with it, but I see program managers using Microsoft Project all the time to track deliverables, and delays in things. It seems to help with tasks, and show when one thing is requirement for another, or how timelines shift when one things change.

I've used MS projects 20 years ago.

It was huge back then, requiring courses to get it to do anything useful. Not sure how it is today, but I'm sure they didn't reduce functionality.

Microsoft also has To Do. This might come with Office 365.

Re: Best strategy on notes for your overall project?

_Bryan — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 18:29:15 GMT

wiebe@CARYA wrote:

@Hooovahh wrote:

I don't have any experience with it, but I see program managers using Microsoft Project all the time to track deliverables, and delays in things. It seems to help with tasks, and show when one thing is requirement for another, or how timelines shift when one things change.

I've used MS projects 20 years ago.

It was huge back then, requiring courses to get it to do anything useful. Not sure how it is today, but I'm sure they didn't reduce functionality.

Microsoft also has To Do. This might come with Office 365.

I do have access to "To DO". I will check into it and see how it compares to the other options so far. I like JIRA, it would just be nice to store it locally even though it is way more program than I think I will need at this point.

Thanks for the info.