[Evolution] Project Management with Evolution

[Jesse Pretorius <jpretorius myrealbox com>]

I've been thinking about project management requirements and the use of
an e-mail client for project management needs. I've seen the very good
integration work that Microsoft has done with MS Project, Outlook and
Sharepoint... but I think that's it's overkill and a change in paradigm
is, in fact, needed.

The simplest form of project management is actually just time and task
management and assignment. Outlook, GroupWise, Evolution all provide
task management and appointment management.

I'm now thinking that a small extension could be made to task management
to make it show up in the calendar (along with appointments) like a
Gantt chart. Essentially what would need to happen is that start and end
dates would need to be set per task.
Perhaps we should eliminate the 'tasks' idea as it now is, and create a
specialised appointment that is marked as a 'project' appointment. This
can then be busy searched against to check when the next available
timeframe is for a project using a particular resource.

The nice thing about using the e-mail client is that:

1) normal e-mail can be used as a transport of all project changes
2) normal calendar benefits can be applied to projects (busy search,
etc)
3) the e-mail client is a de facto habitat
4) already integrated document management systems can be used for
project documentation without extra effort
5) project members can be any number of contacts in existing address
books
6) e-mail messages can be linked to projects
7) potentially instant messages could also be linked to projects
(dependant on e-mail client integration with IM product)

A simple starting point for very basic personal project management would
simply be to allow tasks to be dependant on each other. The next point
would be for tasks to be allocated to 'project appointments' - the tasks
would then act as milestones, and as they're checked off they can
provide a good indication of whether the estimated timeframe for the set
of tasks will be enough. Also, if the e-mail client knows the work day
settings (working and non-working hours) then it can automatically
schedule more appointments if tasks aren't completed.

It's a starting idea, and I think it's relevant and useful.