Project: ATD Project Management

[johnclary]

An effort to standardize the way ATD manages projects and tasks.

Background & Context

This project encompasses a variety of efforts to standardize the way ATD manages projects and tasks. In this context, a "project" may refer to infrastructure projects, programs, campaigns, and performance measurement. Although the Moped is designed to track all mobility infrastructure projects, this project will evaluate the practices and technologies all ATD staff use to manage their work, and seeksto identify ways that we can increase visibility of our activities at multiple scales (i.e., workgroup, division, and department levels).

Outcomes & Deliverables

• division-level capacity-building in task and project management
• a dept-wide project tracking solution that provides a birds-eye view of ATD's portfolio of work
• the development of a data warehouse which makes performance data available in a central location
• integrations across existing project management tools (Moped, Wryke, Github, ...)

Resources

• 6/18 presentation to the Executive Team presentation
• Drive folder

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This Github issue represents a project of Austin Transportation's Data & Technology Services team. Project status is documented regularly in the comments below.

[amenity]

Thoughts: Do we want to email division managers to learn what solutions they are using or have tried? Or create a brief survey?

[johnclary]

Definitely—let's include our research plans in the proposal, and we'll need to stress hard that we want to accommodate existing solutions as much as possible.

[johnclary]

Will probably me on the 6/16 e-team agenda. ~@amenity will forward you the invite when I have it but you can you block off your morning?~ Invite sent.

[johnclary]

We presented to the e-team. Rob is going to think on our findings/proposal and reach out again. In the meantime, we agreed that focusing on Moped would have the biggest impact in advancing Rob's goal for better visibility into ATD's work.

@amenity I'm relegating this to the backlog for the time being.

[amenity]

Lauren S. just asked for advice on project management software and it reminded me of this outstanding request. Have you heard anything about it, @johnclary ?

I'd be really interested to learn what people are using now that teams are more settled into remote work. I'd also be interested to see what using Microsoft Projects looks like in practice at the City (with our specific enterprise subscription and configuration)...

[johnclary]

@amenity no, i think it's iceboxed until Moped is off the ground. our recommendation to do a research + consulting project around project management was a really good idea, but we made it clear we can't do it until it's resourced.

we can definitely connect Lauren to people (Laura D) and platforms (trello, wryke, Monday, ...). not sure how else we can be of help.

[amenity]

Sounds good.

My reply to Lauren's email:

I'm not familiar with Microsoft Projects but starting there makes sense... I imagine there are out of the box Outlook integrations (calendar reminders and such) that would be useful. 

We actually have this languishing in our backlog ... It initially started as a request to identify a department-wide project management tool, but we pushed back on that since needs are so unique across workgroups. Now my vision is that we centralize around a few project management tools so there can be a bit of knowledge-sharing between divisions using the same platform and we (DTS) can build a department-level overview leveraging APIs from said tools. 🌈

Anyhow... Try Projects and let me know how it goes! 

A few other options:

• Trello --- widely-used, flexible, very user-friendly --- used by PIO along with a bit of custom code that Ty wrote to send email notifications
• Wrike --- more robust, steeper learning curve --- used by ATSD 
• Asana --- happy medium between those two in terms of power and ease of use

She liked the look of Wrike and invited me to a vendor demo I wasn't able to attend, but looking forward to seeing how it works out for them!

[amenity]

Note: Lauren and others at SMB are using OneNote for lightweight team coordination and planning. Also, CTM now has training modules available:

• OneNote 101 (2 hour class) – Mar 3rd
• Planner 101 (2 hour class) – Mar 9th

[amenity]

Notion Enterprise might be an interesting solution to this.