Today I had set aside for planning the rest of the time between now and the start of the film shoot. I previously had a big spreadsheet that I had been adding things to but it was time to get everything in a more usable format. Also with other people starting to come on board to take on tasks I had to come up with a solution that allowed everyone to work on the right tasks and the right time without me having to spend any time worrying about exactly what was going on.
I decided to use an online project management tool called basecamp which allows a free licence as well paid models. I went with the free licence which allows you one project with an unlimited number of users. It restricts you in certain ways from the paid option where I think you can share files and attach files to tasks. That might be useful but I am already using Wuala to share files so I didn't see a need to spend money where it isn't necessary.
So in terms of the parts of basecamp that I used and how I split things up that is really what I wanted to go through briefly on this blog. It will take a few weeks for me to understand how well it works but initial thoughts is that it is going to do the job pretty well.
Basecamp has a concept of milestones and to-do lists. To-do lists can be attached to a single milestone or just live on their own. Then you can assign to-do items and/or milestones to people and they can add comments to to-do items and then say when they have been completed. It also sends email reminders when milestones are coming up and you can choose for it to send someone an email when you assign them a to-do list item.
Milestones
For the milestones it was slightly arbitrary on how I came up with these. There were obvious ones that are required before the shooting started (i.e. "Secure Locations") but also some that were required for shooting starting but needed to be split into multiple parts as they had dependent milestones and I needed to make sure that they were done up sooner than the start of shooting. An example of this might be "Finalise Shooting Script" as there are a number of dependent tasks that follow of the back of this.
Some of the milestones that I came up with
All in all I think my advice would be to come up with a high level set of milestones first and then look for any dependencies within them or any really large milestones that can be broken out. One huge milestone can be unwieldy to manage whereas millions of small one task milestones can have the same effect. Let common sense prevail and you will have a gut feel that you have the right balance.
To-do lists
The To-do lists were easier to fill in but a lot more time consuming due to the vast number of them. I am pretty much for having every little task added to a list so that I know that I don't forget anything when there is pressure on to get something finished. You don't want to leave anything half done so get everything down and if you think of another on the train or the bus then make sure you add it to the list.
I copied over the tasks from my spreadsheet first. It would have been good if there was a bulk import function but I couldn't find one. So I copied them over by hand. I created a to-do list and decided that I wanted to match them to every milestone so I did the copying over one milestone at a time. I created logical groupings of tasks into to-do lists.
List of todo list items mapped to their milestones
Once all of the spreadsheet ones were copied over then I went through each milestone and thought of new things that were missing and went to the next level of detail on the ones that were required within the next few weeks (i.e. send email to so and so about something).
The process went fine. I assigned the to-do items around to various people and I am looking forward to seeing them being ticked off. So far so good!