Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to the 'Plogging' World
Roland Piquepaille writes "No, it's not a typo. A plog is short for 'project log' like a blog is short for 'web log.' And plogs start to be used as tools to manage projects, especially in the IT world, as discovered Michael Schrage of the MIT. He reports his findings in an article published by CIO Magazine, "The Virtues of Chitchat." Schrage found that if plogs are not really commonplace, they're not exactly rare. And they are even used to manage large IT projects, such as ERP rollouts. I totally agree with him that a plog is of great value to integrate people in a team or to keep track of the advancement of a project. And you, what's your view? If you're a project manager, do you use a plog for better control? And if not today, will you use one in the future? This overview contains selected excerpts from Schage's article which will help you to answer the above questions."
See this interesting short piece in FP about how military contractors, the Office of Naval Research and Law enforcement agencies are testing plogs on their projects and networks.
Tcd004
I recently started using Basecamp from 37Signals for tracking projects. It's basically a "plogging" system with to-do lists, milestones, file uploading, and one of the most intuitive interfaces I've ever used on the web. I've been tracking internal projects in the way described in the article--I think it's great.
It also makes it really easy to make client-extranet plogs where clients can comment on your entries. Really slick.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
We already have blogs, flogs, photologs, moblogs and now these plogs? Someone needs to stop making new terms up and just call them all logs.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
shameless plog.
har, har.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
Brings back memories, when we would check out each others' .project files... Hopefully this tool will be a little easier to manage.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
pwiki.
They make for excellent documentation both for old and for new developers/users
Richard Stallman's page would be a Freedom Log, one of many in the new flogging scene.
Could you consider SourceForge a 'plog'?
Palm Plog, pLog
I'm not sure that this site is working under the same definition of "plog", but then again, I had never heard of a "project log" before this article.
Never heard James T. Kirk put an entry in the clog.
Omnis amans amens
O.K. it's time to shut off the internet. Thanks for your participation everybody.
If a web log is a blog, then shouldn't project log be a tlog?
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
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People have been project blogging for a while. So someone comes up with the term PLOG and gets on slashdot? sigh.
-Imidazole2
I've found that WIKIs can be useful as a collaboration tool in the workplace.
It can be a free form tool to coordinate various teams and projects. Its important to bear in mind though that even the best tool is no replacement for good management.
The WIKI I'm currently using is TWIKI which is GPL'd.
all make me think of Barf's (John Candy) line in Spaceballs:
"I'm a mog. Half-man, half-dog. I'm my own best friend."
Jason Lotito
For small projects, a "Wiki" system is nice because it is informal. It is kind of like a bunch of named note-pads where anyone (given access) can edit content. It has simplified editing conventions to avoid having to type HTML. For example, a bullet point can be created (upon rendering) simply by including an asterisk at the begginning of a paragraph. (Different wikis have different conventions.)
But for larger groups a more formal "discussion group" may be more appropriate to keep track of who wrote what. These are generally hierarchical, AKA "threaded". The problem many of them have is that it is difficult to reference stuff outside of the hierarchy. They should use some kind of message numbering system so that one can easily make cross-branch references by typing in message numbers.
However, many managers are not used to such systems and are sometimes intimidated by them. Some tend to be "verbal-oriented".
Table-ized A.I.
Do we really need 42 different names for what is basicly the samething?
A few months back i setup a blog to help out our team to help manage the knowledge we acquire throughtout the projects duration. My managers fourtunately approved it. Though it was well recieved throught the team, very few knew what a blog actually is and very few have actually used it. It is rather unfortunate that some employees do not do anything other than things which are manadatory. I'm sure people would have used it much more if it was made mandatory to record all their experiences but we know that it's not possible. An oft quoted excuse is time. Blogging does take time and i totally agree with that but what is not being considered is the time that would be saved by someone else who would come across the same problems after a month or two.
I've worked with Thoughtworks on a few projects and they looove XP. They also love the idea of refactoring and used to keep a project wiki for each project - similar to what is being described here, except without the historical info.
Martin Fowler, owner of Thoughtworks and XP evangelist, keeps a Bliki (his name for a cross between a Blog & a Wiki)
About the only thing proven here is that when e-mail is shown to be sufficient, it's sufficient, and developers won't be quick to jump to other technologies, even when they are more useful.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
Another buzzword for people to throw about like mad. Just what we need.
.plan files some used to the same purpose? Sure, you don't have to finger for the info as it's all on the web now, but it's the same concept, isn't it?
Seriously though, my head may be up my ass on this, but could someone tell me just what the difference between all these *logs and the now long-dead
How is this different than tools we've been using for years like Lotus Notes, eRoom, etc.
I have to say, RP's blog is as uninteresting as it comes, and gets way too much Slashdot time. RP almost reminds me of Jon Katz, without the sometime amusing I'm-not-sure-what-was-in-that-cigarette effect.
MOD PARENT UP, he has a very valid point.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Not too surprising. We used this all the time for the MER rovers at JPL. We used aim chat groups with a logging robot (easy enough to write one using say Net::AIM). Lots of design discussions and training sessions were done through IM and then became a part of the project documentation. Then grep and search when you forget something. Just don't say anything too obnoxious while chatting...
I've been looking for something like this for a long time. Unfortunately, plogging doesn't satisfy my every need. So - let me ask the project managers of slashdot (I know you're out there) - what do you use as project collaboration/management tool? Someone posted a link to "Basecamp" which seemed ok (unfortunately it require credit information just to try a free demo). Are there other tools like that? How do they measure up?
I've been thinking about wiki, but it's a tad to difficult to be useful - my teams usually consists of developers, DB people, graphic designers, customers etc. They'd never learn the simple wiki markup.
As an aside: who is Roland Piquepaille, and how does he manage to get an article in /. every other day?
We would timestamp our .project files and each of us would have their login script finger the other group members, compare the timestamp to the one stored in a flat database (ASCII file) and then, if there were any changes, display the output of the finger command.
Simple, yet effective (plus, it was geeky enough to make sure that nobody outside of R&D or Coding ever bothered to check the status of projects).
These days, unfortunately, hardly anyone seems to be running fingerd and it's virtually always firewalled off to the outside world.
There are so many details to track, and so many nuanced changes that can creep into the process. Rather than sit and wonder how in hell things ended up the way they are, and even more importantly, why specific courses of action where chosen over others, a project log is an invaluable tool. This is unfortunately, an area where almost every PIM falters miserably, since they all make the same limited assumptions: every event will have a start/end date, a start/end time, and will involve one or more participants. Project logging requires some very basic information: date, time, summary, category, and a text field that can accommodate a lengthy (up to 32K) description. All fields should be searchable. I will be very happy when I see KOrganizer or any of the other common Linux-based PIMs with this feature.
- a) tlog
My logic would tell me a project log was a tlog (+ it sounds way cooler =)b) plog
c) clog
My team has a number of large projects going at any time. If everybody project reported it's progress regularly to the "all" mailing list we would quadruple our traffic, and nobody would read anything. So instead I plan to set myself up a blog, tell people that it exists, and maintain it. If people want to read it, super. If they want to get into conversation, even better. I was gonna say "If it flops..." but I dont think it will, because at the very least it'll be a place where I can keep all my own thoughts on things and be my own braindumping ground.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
4/14: This project sucks. I hate you all.
4/13: This project sucks. I hate you all.
4/12: This project sucks. I hate you all.
4/11: Hot chick from Marketing was at meeting. Woohoo!
4/10: This project sucks. I hate you all.
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
In our case, I wrote a little VB applet that reads an authenticated user's name, formats a header, and so forth. The app simply appends the contents of a file to the newest entry and writes the file out again -- to the share the team uses for other stuff. The file is parked on Active Desktop, and includes a refresh tag in it. Every five minutes the user gets a refresh. This has been wildly popular -- the idea being that a lot of quotidian factoids whose relevance is brief is nevertheless at least very relevant while it is, and may be relevant to some, or all of the team. They can glance at the "tickler" as we call it, and decide for themselves. It took me a while, once blogs became commonplace, to realize that we'd been doing it for some time -- without a web server.
Oh look. nntp has been reinvented, only without the standardisation.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Slashdot: The one true glog (*log log)
I used to be able to tell when someone was fingering me. My .plan was a named pipe fed by a shell script. The script would netstat looking for fingerd connections, rsh to the source host, "ps -aux" for finger processes, and send me the results. I'd then send email to the person, asking "why are you fingering me?".
In contrast, our internal Wiki (a JSPWiki instance) grows by leaps and bounds, currently at the rate of 400 new pages a month, and typically 50+ edits a day. There was never any official pronouncement to make it so; I actually started it here just for myself.
I think it took off because it was adopted by some high-profile and prolific people, and thus "It's in the Wiki" and "put it in the Wiki" became common phrases. I think that these combined to make it the "official" place to keep vital information. Quite a few developers have personal blogs and todo lists on the Wiki. The ease of corrections and low barrier to entry have really helped people get into it, though adoption is certainly far from universal. But I've seen meetings where the principal focus seems to be editing a Wiki page until it's correct, which is a great way to arrive at consensus and publish the consensus at the same time.
mahlen