Getting Started Revisited

For Tinderbox Weekend, I've been writing some notes about using Tinderbox for ongoing team planning.

It's an interesting problem. A lot of software in this area focuses on tracking people and resources -- often assuming you're scheduling to optimize equipment and resolve scheduling conflicts. That's what you need for a construction site or a machine shop, but it's not a common office situation.

Tinderbox works really well for keeping track of things -- things you want to do, things someone should think about, things that need to be checked before you ship. It lets you build a nice, informal plan -- the sort of thing you might put on a whiteboard -- and let it evolve over time in an open, collaborative but disciplined setting.

This is a small piece of a huge document, and it's zoomed way out where you can't see any of the detail. But you can see we've got a bunch of marketing tasks, and a bunch of other marketing-related tasks lying around the edges. The bright pink notes designate ideas; the green note is something that needs to be done this week.

Tinderbox works really nicely with a projector as a meeting aid, but the map zooming is nice enough that it's fine, even with big projects, on a 12" screen. Which is how I spent the 5 hours en route to San Francisco, sitting next to a guy who was doing Excel spreadsheets a 17" screen. (Tinderbox 2.3 has some nice new zoom chrome, and since nobody has blogged it yet I'll do it myself)