Manage Project
From Social Patterns
Contents |
Example
You can use most social interfaces to organize projects by sheer force of effort, but it's easier if you've got at least the fundamentals of project management available, such as tasks, calendars, file upload, and collaborative editing.
What
When people get together and form groups they often discover a shared desire to accomplish something tangible or complex, frequently something with a real word (offline) impact.
aka "Workspace" pattern.
When
Use this pattern when you have enabled group formation and wish to host and support group project activities. If you don't have the bandwidth (literally or figuratively) to support this, consider supporting third-party services through service linking.
How
Support your members' ability to orchestrate projects by coordinating goals, tasks and deadlines among multiple participants with varying degrees of commitment and availability.
Provide a workspace for connecting all the facets of the project (people, tasks, dates, collateral) and if possible offer a summarized dashboard view linking to more detailed inventories by facet. This enables asynchronous communication across disconnected geographies.
Enable the creator of the project or a participant to bring in collaborators with invite to participate, and possibly to assign varying rights by individual or group.
With Basecamp, you can add an entire company (team) to your project or invite individuals by adding them to an existing company.
Support task management with the ability to assign tasks, accept tasks, and distribute processes among multiple participants by breaking them down into individual tasks. Optionally support the ability to declare that on task is dependent on another and possibly calculate the critical path to the end goal.
Provide a calendar on which deadline and milestone dates can be scheduled and then verified.
Offer the ability to send messages to projecdt participants, as well as reminders and notifications.
Provide a means for collaborative editing of documents or source code, including version control
.
At github I can make my own clone of the YUI 3.0 codebase, fork it, and then seek to have it merged back into the main trunk.
Enable project participants to make and keep track of decisions.
Optionally provide an interface for project blogging or statuscasting so that project participants can report on their progress and anyone can see at a glance what has been happening lately on the project, or provide a timeline updates view on the dashboard to roll up all recent events in chronological order.
Why
Enabling your community members to work together or co-manage their own efforts increases the utility of your service and the culture of the social environment.
However, your users can often do this effectively with email and phone and perhaps a file sharing system. do you have anything more to offer? Do you need to?
Related Patterns
- Send Invitation
- Updates
- Group Conversation
- Voting
- Collaborative Editing
- Face-to-Face Meeting
- Calendaring
- Reminding
- Service Linking
As Seen On
Sources / Similar Patterns in Other Libraries
- The Power of Many
- Cross-cultural Collaboration
- Regulating Prominence: A Design Pattern for Co-Located Collaboration
- Collaboration
- Manage Project
- Voting
- Collaborative Editing
- Crowdsourcing
- Rights
