A List of Useful Methods

Table of Contents

  1. Plans
  2. Notes
  3. Rank

Plans

 Plans consist of a goal, the steps needed to achieve it, the assignments and deadlines for accomplishing those steps, and periodic checks to review and adjust the fit between the plan and reality if needed.

Worksheets are available to help in laying out such plans.

  1. goal, steps planning form (html)
  2. goal, steps planning sheet (html)
  3. goal, steps planning sheet (text)
Most members of DCNS-Dev also keep their collected plans up to date on the computer and available through the web.

Notes

DCNS-Dev recognizes that written notes are necessary and useful in communicating, documenting, and preserving the status of the many ongoing projects. However, the Athena environment provides a wide variety of mechanisms for this kind of communication, including Zephyr (a terminal-to-terminal posting with relatively no "history"), email and discuss meetings (discuss meetings maintain archives of email posted and allow multiple readers to review material in a thread), netprob (a bug tracking and dispatch system).

DCNS-Dev recommends the following uses and procedures: when several people are involved, a discuss meeting should be set up and used. For individual plans, etc. personal files are satisfactory (standard dir?)

Rank

A quick method of looking at points is to brainstorm a list of the desired points, then quickly rank each point from 1 to 5 in terms of desirability and in terms of likelihood. Multiply the values, then sort in terms of the results. Off to the MIT IS/DCNS Development home page! My home page