When the eZ Press (the book publication division of eZ Systems) produces a book, numerous people are involved in a large project that spans many months and contains a large number of interconnected tasks, many of them prerequisites for completing other tasks.

The "Group Writing Project: Time Management" blog post on the Inspiration Bit blog interested me, because a large part of our book publication process is about time management and coordinating tasks with resource scheduling. (I am the Manager of Knowledge Products at eZ Systems, and am responsible for the eZ Press division.) While I think Vivien will get many interesting posts on techniques and tools that individuals can use to manage their time, another important aspect of time management is how time is managed in large projects where multiple people are involved. This is a challenge because, in most cases, tasks are prerequisites for each other, and the timing of each individual task can affect the timing of the entire project, thus affecting the schedule of everyone involved.

Using our book production process as an example, these are some of the time-based functions that we need to track when we are writing a book:

• When will a chapter be complete, so that an editor can begin work?
• When will the editor complete a chapter, so that the author can do the second draft?
• When will the book be ready for publication? How do we coordinate this with our product release schedule, so that the book contains content relevant to the latest product release?
• What illustrations are required, and when will they have to be ready?

In this blog post, I'll describe how we manage the project of writing books at the eZ Press. We use Basecamp, a web-based multi-user project management application. And because this is a post about time management, we'll start with Basecamp's "Milestone" component:

This screenshot shows the Basecamp project for the book "eZ Publish Content Management Basics". The "Milestones" tab shows the calendar items that have been created for the project. Note that each milestone is assigned to a person. (You can also assign milestones to a generic user, which I find useful when I have a task that needs to be done but I don't know who will do it.)

Two to-do lists have been assigned to the last milestone shown above ("Bergfrid's project preparation"). A to-do list is, obviously, a list of specific tasks. It differs from a milestone in that it is not a project benchmark; the items on a to-do list do not have projected completion dates (although the milestones to which to-do lists are optionally attached do have projected completion dates).

For our book projects, we have forty or fifty milestones, arranged in chronological order. But what happens if the date on an early milestone changes? It will generally affect the dates of subsequent milestones. Therefore, Basecamp allows you to shift milestones based on the change to the current milestone.

At any given time, the eZ publication team is usually dealing with a book, numerous articles, various editing projects and documentation and training materials for one or more product releases. Therefore, we can't schedule by looking at the milestones for one project. Instead, we need a summary of the milestones for all our projects. This is provided on the default "Dashboard" page in Basecamp:

This view shows all milestones; you can also look at a view that only shows milestones assigned to a specific user.

If you must provide time reports (for example for the purpose of billing or job costing), you can use Basecamp to record time spent on each project.

This post may sound like a plug for Basecamp, and I suppose it is, to the degree that Basecamp works for us. However, my intention is more to show the kind of resource you need to have effective time management on large multi-user projects. To recap, you need to be able to:

• track project milestones, including who is responsible and when they will be completed
• modify subsequent milestone dates when you modify the date of a prerequisite milestone
• have granular lists of tasks that are associated with milestones
• have an easy way to see the status of milestones in one or more projects

Some additional features I would like to have in a project management system include:

• The ability to have project templates. (Basecamp has to-do list templates, but not milestone or project templates.)
• The ability to group milestones, so that changing the date of a prerequisite milestone only changes the dates of other milestones in the same group.

I would be interested in hearing about other people's experiences with project management software. Your comments are appreciated!