This thread is a branch of: http://groups.drupal.org/node/39800#comment-112776
There are many good PM applications for managing milestones and tasks. There are also great time tracking apps. What I haven't found is what I would call a "virtual scheduling board." I would like to develop a spec for such a tool here, or discuss pre-existing apps that can address this need.
At my last position, I used a full office wall as a scheduling board. Horizontally, I had a column representing every work day for the next three weeks, and then a single column representing each of the subsequent 6 weeks. Vertically, I had a row for each developer on my team.
I generally scheduled developers in half-day "chunks". On an 8-hour day, a developer can invest 2 4-hour chunks on one or two projects. So, when a new client project came in, I would break out the budget into X number of 4-hour chunks, each of which was represented by a notecard. Reviewing my project estimate, I could roughly determine how many of these cards to distributed to each of my developers - based upon their discipline (ie, theming, module development, project management, etc.).
Then, I would start arranging cards on my board. I prioritized note card placement based upon dependencies, client need - what have you.
Taking this system to the next level, I color coded the notecards - "green" for billable work, "yellow" for non-billable work (such as internal development), and "pink" for warranty work or technical debt.
So, at a single glance at this board, I could see project status (by the color of its notecards and the # of cards remaining), availability of each dev, profitability of each dev, and the profitability of my entire team.
Frankly, I like that this system was /not/ tied to my agile task management system. I would combine the review of the project board with a daily scrum meeting (which, as an ops person, I didn't lead - I would just listen). I let my devs self-organize around project tasks. And I got the information I needed to make sure that we were on track in terms of the budget (asking for rough progress vs the # of notecards used) and client happiness.
This system was fabulous - save for the fact that it does require a big-@#$ physical project board. What I would love to do is develop this as an ajax-based drag-and-drop interface. If it is stand-alone, that's frankly okay. But if it could snarf in milestones and hours estimates from Harvest and Basecamp (or really, OpenAtrium, etc.), that would be even better.
Thoughts? If I could find the development budget to build this out as a SaaS, would any of you use it?
Cheers,
Sean Larkin
ThinkShout.com