Post
by kauffy » Sun Jan 28, 2024 12:14 am
I am completely stunned to find this application. I've been using software like this (e.g., Microsoft Project) for 30 years, and I had such a hard time finding what I wanted, I started to build my own. I'm just beginning to use it, but it appears that a Network Diagram, or Precedence Diagram hasn't made its way in yet. I have a bit of expertise in the area, so I thought I'd offer some suggestions. Since I'm new here, and have no idea of backgrounds or experience, please forgive me if any of this is obvious to you, or you have a similar project management background and are already familiar with many of these concepts.
There are a few types of this diagram, and I've never found any application that does all of them.
The most important one for me (NeurD-- AuDHD) is the precedence diagram. This is a network diagram that is intended only to show what things happen relative to others. This can be attached to a timeline, laying out the precedence left to right, and the spreading the nodes out to when they occur on the timeline. They can be slid in time, altering start/end (and fixing those, as opposed to calculated).
It can also be done where it's based on "what now?"-- that is, it makes it very clear to me, having entered all the relevant data about my life/to-do's, etc., that it can tell me what the next thing I should do is-- this is a legitimate disability, where I (or someone like me) can just get "stuck" and be aware of the things they have to do, but have no ability to decide what's most-important. In other words, priorities are difficult. Again, I haven't dug in fully, to see how much I can articulate/describe a task. Assuming the right variables are available on the task, the calculations for precedence (considering all factors), and answering "What now?" is a huge gain for people like me. Interactively, this display makes it easy for you to add/remove predecessor/successor relationships.
Another type of diagram is really like the first-- a PERT chart. It's intended to show, visually, how time stacks up for critical path-- that is, it considers duration of the task of each node, and accumulates it with all predecessors, the idea being that the longest (time-wise) path to the final node is the critical path (i.e., any delay in any task in that path will delay the entire project/subtask/etc.) Resizing nodes can change their duration.
The distinction between a network diagram and a Gantt is kind of blurred, where Gantt items link to their successors, but the importance of a network diagram is to see actual task information in something that reads like a sequence.
Historically, I've seen network diagrams not handle parent/subtask relationships, but my design for this is to place parent tasks, and then box their children, and still do linking to either child nodes, or to the parent, as the network is set up.
It really is incredible that I never heard about this app before. It has like 90% of the features I wanted in mine. Maybe we'll just marry them (plugin?). (Mine is called GōL which stands for Game of Life-- the short description is Microsoft Project meets Life Balance-- a GREAT defunct to-do app that has a dynamic ToDo list).
