Storybook 3.0 review

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 12, 2011 at 05:33 PM

Pavi, thanks!

I actually posted my suggestion via the developer’s website and got a positive reply; I’m glad that it wasn’t just PR :-)

Let me say that I’d be very happy to suggest specific ideas and to play around with betas and the like. ‘Classic’ project management software rarely differentiate between stuff and people, calling them all ‘resources’. Storybook provides a planning environment where it is OK for people to interact as people, and that is actually part of the plan. Moreover, playing around with the graphs and reports, I found that they can be used to describe collaborators’ roles in a quite humane and integrated way, i.e. “this is what you have to do, these are the people you’ll be working with, this is where you’ll be located and here’s how all this fits into the bigger picture”.

I could go on further into visualisation and how having a plausible plan in one’s mind can help them get somewhere worthwhile, and how stories are powerful visualisation techniques; my point however was not to become too philosophical, but to highlight the practical advantages.

Re my current experimentation, my setup differs slightly from yours: for me each “book” would be a single project and “strands” would be “work packages” which include several tasks (“scenes”) running concurrently. The advantage of using strands this way is that you can view their progress in parallel in the chronological view. Nevertheless, within the context of a multi-project team I can understand the approach of combining projects as strands into a book.

Let me say that I find this discussion useful within the context of this forum, as I’m quite certain I’m not the only one who’s tried various (project/life) planning tools and has been disappointed. I found your idea for personal goal setting particularly thought-provoking. I wonder whether others here might be interested in contributing.

Notwithstanding, I’d be more than happy to continue this discussion to Storybook’s own forum, but unless I’ve missed something there is only a Facebook group mostly used for announcements.