Nuts & Bolts

Since Gregg's throwing down in the comments section of the last post:  I've read so many management books I can find a management aphorism for any position I care to take.  So, I could, for example, say that trying to save $500 per employee is an example of Jim Collins' "Rinsing The Cottage Cheese" from Good To Great.

But well, actually, as much as I like Jim Collins, I 99% agree with Gregg.  $500 per employee is nearly immaterial;  it's a fraction of a percent of your total budget, a fraction of a percent that will probably be earned back because the team is familiar with Microsoft, it's a known quantity, and it supports that one bullet point I need.  The only reason OpenOffice is crossing my mind right now is because A) I use it at home - if it's good enough for the home why isn't it good enough for work? and B) bootstrapping mentality - we're starting a company, and therefore cash is like oxygen, and therefore if we can save $500 * x in those first few months without a reduction of our team's efficiency we're going to do it. 

Speaking of lean thinking, at Treyarch we pirated a lot of the software we used to do game development.  That's one way to think lean...but it's something I'm not proud of and wouldn't do again.  That practice ended when we got bought by Activision - breaking the law is against Activision policy. 

I don't think Greg's idea of keeping the schedule spreadsheet under source control will work - it's hard enough to get people to update their estimates and actuals every day - if when they try to do it they usually discover that the spreadsheet is locked by someone else it will never get done.  And...one spreadsheet per person isn't quite an option, because even though tasks aren't fungible we do find that we're swapping them around from person to person enough for too many spreadsheets to quickly become annoying...

So I'm still in the Excel camp.  Although if Joel Spolsky releases a version of FogBugz that has his scheduling system built in I'd spend the money on that instead.

Comments

[Corvus]

You can refer to data in an external Open Office spreadsheet. Each employee could have their own sheet and project managers could use a central sheet to keep track of each individual.

[Greg]

Well, depends on the size of your team... For a big one, yes, locking might be an issue. For <12, not a problem... So probably works for indie developers.

And yes, I'm thinking along the same lines--at our currently capitalization, $500/seat savings is indeed material.

[spoonix]

Reading Spolsky's article, it strikes me that the real value there is in the method, not necessarily the program. :) So I have to wonder... why not just drop Excel in favor of something better suited to it like a web app that can be run on an intranet server under someone's desk? Using a framework like Rails, you could probably get something useable (if a bit ugly) in 3 days.

The catch is, however, that assumes you know Rails or some other web framework that you can use to whip up the app in a short time. If you don't, then you're left with hiring someone to write it, in which case we're back to square 1.

Another option is to do a little digging on sourceforge.net or freshmeat.net and see what sorts of free scheduling software is out there... if something like dotProject can meet your needs then it's just a matter of getting the software installed and configured.

[greggman]

I didn't mean to suggest you should stick with MS Office. I meant to suggest that there's a general problem that people in charge think in terms of pennies saved now instead of dollars saved latter. They think "hmmm, I don't want to pay $600 a person for ____, I'll just force all my team to use this free thing and save that money" They don't realize that that thought should not be in the for front of their mind. The thought should be, "how will I make this team most efficient?" If Open Office truely meets your needs then use it just don't evaluate it based on price.

[zachary j gamedesigner]

FogBugz has some nice usability features but is overall far worse than bugzilla, mainly due to the interesting ability to silently error out when you try to upload a screenshot using it's own god damn tool if the screenshot is larger than it wants. Took me a few days to even figure that out.