An Omniplan Template - for professional web projects
Reciprocity
I've long been an advocate of reciprocity within the social and developmental areas of the web; giving something back to the wider community, has, in my opinion, been the most significant factor in moving web tools from the 'geeks', to those who can use them on a daily basis to assist with their business or personal experiences. Open Source, Javascript Libraries, APIs and even Google, are good examples of it in action. Heck, even this Posterous blog is.
However, I never cease to be amazed at how many great applications are being created each and every day, which are distributed FREE! Whilst I voraciously use as many as I can to help develop i-KOS' business (and by implication, our clients), I've never really been in a position to 'give' anything back. I'm a strategist at heart, so my expertise lies in evaluation and communication, but not really ever in the 'doing'.
Consequently I only ever seem to hone my skills to a certain level (in any given software or application), before passing my knowledge on to those best suited to extend it further (yes i-KOS wireframers, I'm thinking about you here). So today marks a new approach for me.
Brief History
Back to reciprocity (where I began) and a bit of back story.
It's rare that I fail to discover something that someone hasn't already done before, but I found recently that I couldn't locate a good Omniplan Document which would serve as a benchmark for web development projects. In the absence of an official Project Manager, I'd taken up the baton on some of our most significant projects, and really needed to demonstrate a good graphic representation of project statuses (is that statii???). Armed with a PDF of a MS project doc, I set out to replicate the original plan in Omniplan, and update to make it current.
Needless to say, this didn't quite go according to plan. As an Omniplan virgin, with limited experience of formal Project Management disciplines, the terminology seemed daunting. Constraint Start & End, Variance of start, Dependencies. Duration as opposed to Effort. 'Ho hum, shall I leave this for someone else?'
Not really my style, I have to say. And besides, how hard can it be (I've met a few project managers)? Nice, to a man. Efficient, definitely. Budding genii (got it right this time), err, maybe not.
On to Omniplan
So I got cracking, and after a rapid learning curve, I've reached a point where I can kick open the Omni, and be confident of setting expectations from the outset. The Gantt chart even bears a close resemblance to our reality, for what I class as mid-tier web dev projects(£10-£25k). I've leaned heavily on the sample file available on the Omni website www.omnigroup.com, so many thanks for the colour styling theme.
Screenshot of file below:
I'm keen to get some feedback from anyone who regularly uses Omni, as I'm sure I'm missing many many tricks, but for any other Newbs to Omniplan, then I hope the attached file helps. Hey, you can always bin it if not. I plan on adding an overlay of project management time shortly as well - so consider this as version 1.
DM me on twitter @simonsurtees
Obviously this will need to be adapted for your specific needs; I doubt everyone uses wireframing as much as we do, nor for that matter will you have a team specifically developing in Drupal. But I hope it will kick start some of your projects, and give a guide for delivering a well balanced development project. In today's financial climate, cash flow is king, so I've paid particular attention to the financial milestones being accurate and 'in balance'.
On a personal note, I've realised that the request for copy & imagery must be done early! Have fun playing.
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