[kplato] Expectations in this Project (Project Planning 102)

[Chris Clarke]

It seems to me from some of the discussion on this list that we're getting to 
a point where the people with formal project managment experience are making 
a common set of assumptions that the people without may not be aware of:

KPlato's Intended Purpose
--------------------
The purpose of KPlato is fairly easy to define in general terms.  What we're 
trying to build is a program that allows us to a) Define a set of tasks and 
the relationships between them, b) Place time and resource constraints on 
these tasks, and c) Calculate a schedule, and determine if that can be fit 
into the constraints.

User Interface
----------
There is currently very little debate on the way this information is going to 
be displayed, because in the project managment field this is already well 
defined.  There are 3 main ways to display a project:

a) Spreadsheet:  The list of tasks and subtasks are displayed down the left 
column of the spreadsheet.  The columns across the spreadsheet display the 
various attributes of those tasks.

b) PERT chart:  The tasks and their relationships are displayed in a network 
diagram.  You can see an example at http://www.criticaltools.com/grppert.htm

c) GANTT chart: I'm not actually sure how to describe the look in a sentence, 
for an example go to 
http://www.me.umn.edu/courses/me4054/assignments/gantt.html and look at the 
bottom of the page.

Currently I think we're planning on building the spreadsheet first because it 
is the simplest.

Data To Be Entered
---------------
Now this is the thing that nobody can agree on.  It differs depending on 
project, background, industry, and all sorts of other things.  This is why 
most of the discussion is around this point; it's the part that isn't well 
defined already and the most important to coming up with a usable tool.

I'll update the web site in the next couple of days to distill what we've 
come up with so far.  For those who don't know, if you check 
http://www.koffice.org/kplato you will find a document listing what has been 
discussed to date on this list (up to date as of last Friday, things are 
moving fast right now).  This document will eventually morph into a 
requirements/design document.

Cheers,
Chris.
-- 
Chris Clarke
security@cfourconsulting.com
http://cfourconsulting.com