Welcome to the 'Plogging' World 185
Roland Piquepaille writes "No, it's not a typo. A plog is short for 'project log' like a blog is short for 'web log.' And plogs start to be used as tools to manage projects, especially in the IT world, as discovered Michael Schrage of the MIT. He reports his findings in an article published by CIO Magazine, "The Virtues of Chitchat." Schrage found that if plogs are not really commonplace, they're not exactly rare. And they are even used to manage large IT projects, such as ERP rollouts. I totally agree with him that a plog is of great value to integrate people in a team or to keep track of the advancement of a project. And you, what's your view? If you're a project manager, do you use a plog for better control? And if not today, will you use one in the future? This overview contains selected excerpts from Schage's article which will help you to answer the above questions."
Ah, like the old .project file (Score:5, Interesting)
one word (Score:5, Interesting)
They make for excellent documentation both for old and for new developers/users
SF (Score:5, Interesting)
interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
tlog? (Score:5, Interesting)
-m
Workplace Wikis are useful (Score:5, Interesting)
It can be a free form tool to coordinate various teams and projects. Its important to bear in mind though that even the best tool is no replacement for good management.
The WIKI I'm currently using is TWIKI [twiki.org] which is GPL'd.
Re:Basecamp for Plogging (Score:5, Interesting)
my uni uses tutos [tutos.org].
and the software engineering documentation subject has "Document the building of your very own team management software" as their semester project [mu.oz.au]
actually, in order to manage all the docs our team used a combination of roundup, mailman and B2 blog to make our own rapidly developed team work space...
it was kinda ironic - using a collaborative online project management system to design a collaborative online project management system
in the end, though, the strain of having 7 people work on 1 document through a webbased interface got too much so we ended up using CVS on the school unix servers
My experiments in my team with a blog. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Do we need more types? (Score:4, Interesting)
I glad the idea has a specific name, now that there is a buzz word attached to the idea maybe someone who matters will pick up on it and champion the idea, it would be useful, no matter what it's called.
In theme with other posts... (Score:3, Interesting)
About the only thing proven here is that when e-mail is shown to be sufficient, it's sufficient, and developers won't be quick to jump to other technologies, even when they are more useful.
Logs on the JPL Mars Exploration Rovers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Do we need more types? (Score:5, Interesting)
Weblogs are personal web pages or journals. Plogs are project logs. Photologs are photo journals. Sure, the terms are longer, but they actually sound reasonable compared to "blog."
What do the rest of you use? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been thinking about wiki, but it's a tad to difficult to be useful - my teams usually consists of developers, DB people, graphic designers, customers etc. They'd never learn the simple wiki markup.
Nostalgia... (Score:4, Interesting)
We would timestamp our .project files and each of us would have their login script finger the other group members, compare the timestamp to the one stored in a flat database (ASCII file) and then, if there were any changes, display the output of the finger command.
Simple, yet effective (plus, it was geeky enough to make sure that nobody outside of R&D or Coding ever bothered to check the status of projects).
These days, unfortunately, hardly anyone seems to be running fingerd and it's virtually always firewalled off to the outside world.
Plogs (Score:1, Interesting)
I have a ton of neat ideas and thoughts on improving development, but in that same respect, I'm extremely forgetful. If I can keep from re-inventing the wheel, so much the better. Plus, what if I were to die in a horrible shopping cart accident? How would my (now ex-)employer recover from the loss? Well, if they were smart, they would look at my home directory and see my project info in plain sight and pick up the pieces in an instant (which they did when they laid me off in 2001), just as I would if I were to take a vacation for a week and come back to work I had left idling.
Re:Workplace Wikis are useful (Score:3, Interesting)
1) On a free-form weblog or discussion board, it is much easier to be honest about problems. Compare that to formalised documents such as progress reports, where most people tend to play down issues because they think they can fix them themselves before the next report is due, or because they don't want to make their boss (or themselves) look bad on a formal and perpetually archived document. Good management requires good and timely information... our company has an unmoderated board with lots of flames, gripes and complaints, and if I were the CEO, I'd take a peek at that board every now and then.
2) Formalised document hierarchies can sometimes be rather a discouragement to recording the odd thought, idea or issue. Should this be a memo, briefing note, how-to, FYI bulletin, technical subsystem spec or should it go on the ARID log? Where do I file it? Does it need to be reviewed? Sometimes, not having a lot of structure can be good, and weblogs can provide such an environment.
Hey, I just did that. (Score:3, Interesting)
My team has a number of large projects going at any time. If everybody project reported it's progress regularly to the "all" mailing list we would quadruple our traffic, and nobody would read anything. So instead I plan to set myself up a blog, tell people that it exists, and maintain it. If people want to read it, super. If they want to get into conversation, even better. I was gonna say "If it flops..." but I dont think it will, because at the very least it'll be a place where I can keep all my own thoughts on things and be my own braindumping ground.
Been doing it for years (Score:2, Interesting)
Stupid .plan tricks (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Basecamp for Plogging (Score:3, Interesting)
Wiki success. (Score:3, Interesting)
In contrast, our internal Wiki (a JSPWiki [jspwiki.org] instance) grows by leaps and bounds, currently at the rate of 400 new pages a month, and typically 50+ edits a day. There was never any official pronouncement to make it so; I actually started it here just for myself.
I think it took off because it was adopted by some high-profile and prolific people, and thus "It's in the Wiki" and "put it in the Wiki" became common phrases. I think that these combined to make it the "official" place to keep vital information. Quite a few developers have personal blogs and todo lists on the Wiki. The ease of corrections and low barrier to entry have really helped people get into it, though adoption is certainly far from universal. But I've seen meetings where the principal focus seems to be editing a Wiki page until it's correct, which is a great way to arrive at consensus and publish the consensus at the same time.
mahlen