Easy EE Project Management with a Digital White Board
Boyink described his "project wall" as a means of visually mapping all the data and resources he has accumulated about a project. The Boyink method involves taping every scrap of paper and post-it note alongside hand written annotations and drawn correlations on a giant white board for a given ExpressionEngine development project - The same way detectives map the correlations between events and criminals on a wall in every single cop show you have ever seen.
For us old timers, this analog method of tracking the progress of a project is as familiar as sketching concepts with a pencil (before turning to the computer to render a design comp). Now that I've dated myself appropriately, why should you care about an archaic method of managing a project? SImple. It works ... Really well. As Boyink opined, there is no better way to visualize the scope and iterative progress of a project with numerous moving parts.
There is a problem with this method: It requires space. Lots of space.
Prior to getting married and moving into a much smaller home office space, I taped and pinned resource material to the wall in my office in exactly this manner. I didn't have a white board. When I moved out of that house, I spent a couple days spackling and painting in an effort to repair the damage. That was five years ago. I tried unsuccessfully to find an alternative White Board method, such as by spreading projects out on the floor. This worked reasonably well until we adopted our cat who, in turn, discovered a giant litter box. I've attempted to White Board on what little wall space is available in my office only to become frustrated by having to bend over a large desk and a big monitor in order to reach the wall. I gave up on white-boarding only to discover that my memory is not as good as I needed it to be in order to remember everything I need to remember when building an EE web site. Details get lost and, as a result, time gets wasted.
Enter Curio
Zengobi's Curio was developed by former old school ad guys to replace the analog White Board. I stumbled on Curio last year and had a white-boarding epiphany. Because most of my clients are remote and most of the source materials they supply to me are in digital format, I've found that Curio saves me a ton of time preparing projects for development and managing projects during development. I can literally dump every file and scrap of relevant information I collect into a space(s) and organize all the digital assets in any manner I choose.
The biggest benefit of Curio is something Boyink touched on in his presentation. With few exceptions, because he works out of the home, it isn't always possible, nor desirable, to invite a client to your home office to see the project scope taped to your office wall. Curio allows you to save your walls (idea spaces) in HTML or PDF formats so you can post them to the web or send them via email to your clients for discussion.
The second biggest benefit of a digital wall is that once the project is over, you have a complete record of the project, so if your client requests a major site expansion a year later, you can simply reopen the specific Curio wall and quickly get reacquainted with the project. Once an analog "wall" is dismantled after a project is completed, your record of the projects' progression is gone.
Lastly, digital white boards save paper.
Since adopting Curio for creating my project "walls", I typically have a project Idea Space open for easy access and nearly constant update. Courtesy of years of collecting computer hardware, I now enjoy the awesome benefit of a two-monitor set up that allows me to have Curio open on one entire screen and all my design apps open in another. Obviously, for those of you who don't have 57" of screen to utilize, the same issue applies - the more screen real estate you have the more efficient Curio becomes. But, as long as you know a few key commands or utilize Spaces (Mac users), one monitor will easily suffice.
A screenshot of an early stage Curio white board ("project wall").
I'm not going to provide a detailed review of Curio, other than to say it is akin to a digital Swiss Army knife for creative professionals. It does everything from project management to mind maps to brainstorming to, well, nearly everything. Developing sites with ExpressionEngine necessitates well-developed organizational and planning techniques and Curio is a tool that will help you keep track of an, often times, complicated development process.
It is always nice to get a glimpse for how other creatives work because it invariably helps me to improve my own processes. Boyink's presentation was no exception as I have already incorporated a couple of his ideas into my own Curio white boards (as seen above in the expanded detail of the weblog/page checklists). Thanks Mr. Boyink.
If you have trouble managing projects and don't have the wall space to put up white boards, do yourself a favor and have a look at Curio.
