Organization in a GIS Shop

Question

This question is about staying organized and current on all your to dos and project tasks. For me I am an avid user of GTD and a variety of online tools such as evernote, toodledo, and gmail. I would love to hear about organizational tools that are used by my fellow GIS practitioners. What tools do you use to stay on task and get your work done?

Answer 1

I'm answering from a programmer's point of view. I have to keep track of the following categories of data:

1. Immediate tasks (e.g., "Fix the road type bug", "Clear disk space on machine X")

   For these I use Google Docs spreadsheet with tasks. Each task has a due date, urgency level, importance level, and the team members who is responsible. The document is shared with the entire team.

2. Long-term tasks (e.g., "Develop an algorithm to fix road disconnections")

   For this kind of tasks I use Trac (see demo here). It's an excellent open-source software with web interface to manage, assign and oversee the progress of tasks. Tasks are grouped into named milestones (e.g., "Version 2.0") which makes it easy to monitor the progress of an entire project.

3. Developer's knowledge base (e.g., a document which describes how to install a PostGIS server on Amazon EC2, coding guidelines and naming conventions, usage of geospatial functions in the database, etc)

   Sphinx is a professional document generator, used in many many open source software projects, most notably Python. It uses a markup language called reStructuredText, which means that writing a sphinx document is much like writing an answer on this site or an article in Wikipedia. It takes some time to learn it, but after you've conquered the obscurities of the language, you document will be beautiful, interconnected, and very readable.

4. Bug reports and system failures:

   Trac. Each software component and server has its own Trac classification, so reporting and viewing bugs is very easy.

5. Appointments and schedule:

   Google Docs Calendar. Definitely the best way to manage your time.

6. Code repository:

   I use bazaar, but any mainstream distributed code versioning system will be OK.

7. Raw data (e.g., shapefiles)

   RAID hard drive backed up on Amazon S3.

8. Spatial data

   PostGIS database.

Answer 2

Gmail Calendar (reminders), Gmail 'labels' (+gmail labs Nested Labels,Superstars) Google Speadsheets. Outlook 2010. (synced with gmail for offline and archive backup). have used MS project in the past but only for very large complex projects

Do like the Gantt Project for medium sized projects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GanttProject

Answer 3

Personally I don't mix work tasks and personal life tasks, so I use different "tools":

1. For personal work I use MS Outlook tasks list, organized using categories and calendar. Many tasks come by email, so it is convenient to flag them and have in task list in one second. Besides, as I access Outlook only in company's computer, it is a good excuse not to take work home and get it done at work.

2. For projects where several colleages are working, we use JIRA - it's really convenient tool not only to track bugs but also tasks and decision-making.

3. For personal life it hasn't served it purpose to use any online tool (except birthday reminders in Google calendar), since I don't use any smartphone or so. So I use paper to do list and paper calendars (http://www.pocketmod.com) which are always with me and work excellent for my life.