Edward Yarnold

It shouldn’t be news to anyone, but organising your projects (and assets within those projects) in an efficient manner will save you a load of time.   Perhaps not immediately, but at some point in the future you’ll be thanking yourself hundreds of times over that you took the time to organise things in the first place.

Starting with the basics, organisation in projects can be as simple as ensuring that you store all information supplied by the client with the project, in a folder called something like ‘assets’.   Typically I would split them by asset type – images for web, images for print, documents for web download, internal documents, other – and perhaps include a ‘supply date’ in the filename of each.

Next, write stuff down!  If a particular part of the project depends on an external service being available, write this down in a document that stays with the project wherever it goes.  Any useful information that is in your head the day you write the code for the project should probably be written down.  You more than likely won’t remember in 2 years time when something goes wrong!  All of this information could simply be stored in a README file.

Good organisation doesn’t boil down to simply putting things in to folders, or keeping notes.  Of course, these actions are a part of the organisation, but don’t cover everything.  More importantly – especially in the IT industry – consistency can be the best time saving characteristic you can introduce to your work.  Being consistent is almost synonymous with being organised when it comes to your project management…

I save time (and frustration!) by:

• Naming projects consistently.  My project name tends to match the main part of the domain name on which the web site or project will be hosted.  If I’ve a domain called edwardyarnold.co.uk, the project in my subversion repository will be called edwardyarnold.  This makes it a lot quicker to put my hand on the correct project if a change needs to be made.
• Naming the associated MySQL databases consistently.  For the above project, the CMS database would be called edwardyarnold_cms.  If the site were an ecommerce site, it would be called edwardyarnold_ecom.  This makes finding the relevant database in a phpmyadmin screen much quicker than if the databases weren’t named consistently.
• Ensuring that if a project is replaced with an entirely new version, it is archived with a date.  If I replaced the edwardyarnold.co.uk site with a completely new build, I’d move the current project to edwardyarnold_2010_archive and create a new one to replace the old.  This is a better approach to dating the new version of the site – the new version of the site would still exist in 2011 but would appear to be out of date if dated 2010.  Annoying to anyone who didn’t know that that was the ‘latest’ version of the site.
• Naming administration area directories according to a set naming pattern (I won’t disclose that here).  This means that anyone who I work with that knows the pattern can find the administration area without looking up the directory name.  (They will of course have to look up the username and password, if not saved in their browser).

These save a tiny amount of time individually, but collectively – and applied over multiple projects – the tiny amounts of time soon add up, and you can start to actually notice the saving.  Additionally, following these ‘rules’ means that new people joining your team can begin to understand and get a grip of the way you work quicker than if everything was done differently for each project.  In larger organisations this can reduce recruitment costs (remember, downtime whilst training your new staff member is a hidden recruitment cost…!) as well as saving your existing team time.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 6:16 am and is filed under Best Practice, Tips, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.