Panel

Ashe Dryden (twitter github blog)
Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up)

Discussion
00:58 - Project Management
02:46 - Project Management Software

Pivotal Tracker
Redmine
Asana

05:26 - Communication and Clarification

Discovery and Estimation

09:59 - Agile Methodology Workflow
15:28 - Billing Project Management Time

Harvest

18:57 - Managing Internal Projects

To-Do Lists
Outsourcing
Board of Advisors

25:46 - Managing Future Projects and Ideas

Getting Things Done by David Allen

28:47 - Book Writing Workflows

Picks

National Geographic Found (Ashe)
Will You Sponsor Me? - Elise Worthy (Ashe)
MediaElement.js (Chuck)
Hover (Chuck)

Next Week
Travel
Transcript
ASHE: Life's a little weird sometimes...

[Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net]

CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 60 of the Freelancers Show! This week on our panel we have, Ashe Dryden.

ASHE: Hello!

CHUCK: And I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. We have a few people out at, I think it's MicroConf...I should just look it up so I know the name of the conference. Anyway, they are in Vegas and I think we might have one or two people at RailsConf, or it may just have stuff going on today. So, it's just the two of us!

ASHE: Sounds good! [laughs]

CHUCK: It feels like you're filling in for Eric!

ASHE: Eric can never be replaced...

CHUCK: [laughs] Only temporarily, huh?

ASHE: Only temporarily. I'm just standing up for you, buddy!

CHUCK: [laughs] Awesome. Alright, so this week, I was thinking that we could talk about "Managing Projects", both projects, kind of internal projects I guess, and for clients - client projects. I have to say this is something that I'm really not good at, so I'm hoping that you can impart some wisdom.

ASHE: Oh, I'll do my best. I think this is something that a lot of people struggle with. I don't think that many of us come from a Project Management or like any kind of Management background, really. So, it's something that's very new that we don't necessarily have the skills for right off the bat.

CHUCK: Yeah. But at the same time, if you've worked for a company on a team, using somebody managing the project, whether they were aware of it or not…

ASHE: Yeah. I think that working at a couple of places is definitely given me an idea of what Project Management isn't, which might help to kind of stir in the direction of what Project Management should be.

CHUCK: So, you're going to give us an 'anti-definition' then?

ASHE: Yeah...I don't know. I've struggled a lot. I think that a lot of people have similar complaints about project management styles or like the kind of stereotype of what a Project Manager is; promising things too soon or promising things without actually running it by the developers. Or, trying to figure out what actual problems are in the project management process instead of just the tools that are involved, because I've seen that one a lot. Where, "Oh, something's not working! Let's just change the project management software that we're using because that must be the problem."

[laughter]

CHUCK: That's right. It's always the tools.

ASHE: Yeah! So, that's definitely not the way that I would go. I'm kind of interested, what are you doing for project management right now for software?

CHUCK: I've used, in software projects anyway, I've used Pivotal Tracker; really really like Pivotal Tracker. I've looked at Redmine, and I want to get to know it better mainly because I have people coming to me and asking me to customize it. And so, I wanted to get to know it a little bit better. But for the most part, that's what I'm using. And then for other projects, I've been using Asana lately, which was mentioned on the show by Farnoosh Brock, if you want to go back and look at that. So yeah, that's kind of what I've been doing.