Team/Project Management
 

I posted here to ask different playerworlds, How does your playerworld manage it's team of developers? What kind of conventions do you use to keep everybody in the loop, dish out assignments, discuss things, etc.

Is there a website invovled?
Do use comments?
Do you used text files in the File Browser?
What do you do?

Ruins:

I keep the lowest staff team possible with experienced people that I trust.
I enforce rules and my decisions on how things should be done, when and why, but I still ask for my staffs' opinions.

We use comments to store list of ideas, things to do (/opencomments todolist).
We don't have a website but I plan to have one soon.
We mostly talk on msn when the full team is not on RC at the same time and/or when someone is busy with X thing.


Anything else you'd like to ask ? =)

Although the most I people I have managed over has been 2, I found using text files is much better than using comments because people can't be like 'I forgot what comment this and that was in so I couldn't check it'

These are the rights I usually give out;
It allows people to leave notes if needed and lets people see what other people are also working on to keep them motivated.

Comments are just too easily forgotten which is a problem. With this it is also easy to back up all the notes if needed without accidently forgetting a few.

I've tried using a Wiki but it's just not worth the extra time to setup, teach others, and maintain.

Comments seem to be the most effective for collaboration on Graal, resorting only to txt files when the information is sensitive enough. I usually use.. *projects, *<project> and *<project>_assignments

All communication through RC, I don't want to be annoyed over my messengers because what I do on Graal. If they can't log on RC or Graal, then they probably can't work (or don't want to) either.

A simple Gantt chart add-on for RC would work great for project management though.

MSN dictatorship.

All staff discussions/ideas/thoughts etc. are handled through a private section of Maloria's forums. I find that it works pretty good, but for some reason a lot of individuals have issues with wanting to use forums for anything.

AIM dictatorship

chris tried to make us use a website once

I didn't mind that but it should have been eras offical forums and just had a private section for staff.

I like the idea of having everything handled through RC, although I'm not opposed if there was a well-established easy to use in-game method as well. But it seems just too difficult to use something external. I mean, especially if the team isn't really meshing, or existent as it is, something external definitely doesn't seem like it would help.

Once plans are finalized by management/administration we put the plans on our forums in a private section for staff and give all staff a chance to respond with any questions or ideas they have to make the plans better. After that we are using comments right now, but Matt is in the process of installing/updating a project manager for our website.

ive worked on playerworlds that tried to use text files but they failed after some time (due new people/staffs on the server, and no body gives them rights to those files).

comments vs textfiles, i think comments wins, if you document them, like in serveroptions.

I tried a couple of things for Era but ultimately just fell back to comments. The problem is that even with reminders on RC like "5 new posts since your last login to the Era Staff Forums!", for some reason staff still neglect reading them.

I'd love to have used a wiki but I think the same problem would have existed (staff not wanting to use it, lol).

EDIT: Google Docs is also great for collaboration on Graal. I've found uses for both spreadsheets and documents. You can even use "forms" for creating and organizing hiring applications.

I've added a project manager to the N-Pulse site so that's how most assignments/projects will be managed. For quite small tasks, we just use comments and the file manager.

We were using some Google tool (I forgot the name) before, but the interface wasn't too good.

Google Wave

I really enjoyed google Wave, but everybody stopped responding to me :p

I actively use google wave for collaboration helping a friend with web design issues.

Yep. It's extremely useful for collaboration.
Was annoyed to hear that they're ditching it. :(

oh my god. they are?

Yeah. Not enough people were using it.
It was meant to replace email. But they went in the wrong direction when they added email alerts for Wave updates, instead of allowing you to view/receive your emails from within Wave. So it remained a supplementary thing, instead of being a replacement.

Indeed, I am surprised it isn't doing better, but that's the first thing I thought when I heard that. They should let you get your email from wave.