Originally published in the APA Information Technology Division Newsletter, February 2006
Background
The Client:
Harrison County, Mississippi has only had zoning since 2000. The zoning department is understaffed and overworked. Their need for technical assistance pre-Katrina has only been exacerbated by the damage the hurricane wrought.
Interest in developing farther inland has been more than piqued. Land economics are not what they were when the urbanized areas along the Gulf Coast were first developed. People are tired of the uncertainty: over the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) forthcoming Base Flood Elevations (BFEs) and their susceptibility to the next big storm if they rebuild in at-risk areas. Even before Katrina, the Harrison County Board of Supervisors had approved the construction of Tradition, Mississippi—a Master Planned Community predicted to house 45,000 to 50,000 at full buildout (Source: Tradition Literature). To put that number in context, Biloxi only had 50,644, according to the 2000 Census. People are already tired of living in FEMA trailers; with debris cleanup only now reaching the halfway point in some municipalities.
Like too many other jurisdictions, the Harrison County Comprehensive Plan did little more than meet a requirement before zoning could be put in place. Rife with errors and irrelevances, the document cannot begin to plan for post-disaster recovery on a scale previously unimagined by even the most prepared planning agencies.
The Technical Assistance Teams:
A group of planning students from The Ohio State University traveled to Harrison County at the beginning of the Winter Quarter 2006 to provide some of the needed technical assistance. Because of budget constraints, the group was limited to 12. Three professional planners from two states paid their own way to lead smaller breakout teams from this group of 12 students on three substantial projects. The course professor served as overall project manager.
All classes at the university can be supplemented with an online course management system. The university recently switched from WebCT to Carmen. Both systems offer enhanced course communications through a common portal, with other modules such as discussion forums, gradebooks, online quizzes and tests, and assignment dropboxes. The professor has full access to adjust the web content and generally manage the course. Students can only manipulate the content available to the whole course list through the discussion forums, which integrate poorly with students’ primary form of online communication—e-mail.
We had the need to begin work well before the quarter and class officially started, as fieldwork in Mississippi was scheduled to occur during the first week of the quarter. Those drawbacks aside, the course management system could have suited our purposes.
Had it not been for the first major hurdle, I may not have looked elsewhere for a true project management system. The first major hurdle: our three team managers were professionals—unaffiliated with the university in any way. Bureaucracy prevents individuals from easily being added to a course management website if they are not enrolled in the course.
By mid-December we were using Basecamp, an online project management system from 37 Signals, LLC as our primary form of communication.
Deliverables:
The three teams are still at work on their projects. By the end of Winter Quarter, the class will deliver two area plans for places in unincorporated Harrison County—DeLisle and Saucier. The third team is proposing amendments to the countywide zoning code— including an increase in the zones where modular housing is permitted and a home occupation ordinance. The Mississippi Renewal Forum, which took place in October 2005 as a part of the Governor’s Commission, focused on the incorporated towns and cities along the Gulf Coast. Team members are looking at what parts of the forum’s solutions might be applied to the county zoning code governing unincorporated areas.
With only one week of fieldwork, including two town hall meetings, the class expects no delays in these final deliverables.
Lessons Learned
Why Project Management?
Team size is limited. Not all the skills necessary to do an area plan within ten weeks are available in a group of four or five individuals. Our approach reflects Clark’s (2002) advice that “Today’s organizations and work units must be flexible and product-focused. They must be able to respond to new and changing demands, and contribute when and where the need arises.”
Assignments are more flexible and emergency switching is possible. For example, out of all 12 team members, we need only one Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technician, one Adobe InDesign expert for plan layout, and only one copy editor. These larger class tasks co-mingle with team assignments. The class professor has more skillsets available that she can assign and reassign as priorities change.
Our tasks are not wholly compartmentalized either. For example, the two teams working on area plans are writing parallel documents, often asking the same questions that need only be answered once. In another example, the zoning team is familiar with the zoning 3 ordinance, and can often answer questions for the teams writing area plans—saving time in the end. Project management tools coordinate and organize these communications.
Why Basecamp?
An online project management system, such as Basecamp, creates an institutional memory in the absence of an institution. It is flexible, allowing the university team members to integrate project communication with planners in Harrison County and our professional team leaders.
If future classes are to build on the work this class has done in Harrison County, they will not have to start from scratch, either. Planning is an iterative process, building on the results of the previous iteration. While a planning document might suffice, the more memory there is to build from, the better the next iteration will be.
Basecamp has already proven extensible, allowing another University of Michigan students assisting Harrison County over their Spring Break a view of our work and background research thus far.
The features are limited: milestones, to-do lists, messages, writeboards, and file exchange space. Where other project management systems try and provide every feature an organization might possibly need, Basecamp’s designers have taken a streamlined approach. The result is an uncluttered, intuitive user interface (UI).
Milestones are key to organizing a Basecamp project. They are the only date-sensitive aspects of the system. Both to-do lists and messages can be associated with milestones. This provides for a quick calendar overview of the project rather than a cluttered calendar full of every minute task due on each day. Such a to-do list, however, is only clicks away.
To-dos can be assigned to project members or whole organizations. They can also remain unassigned, allowing individuals to pick up tasks themselves when possible. To-dos must be organized under separate lists for further organization. One can view the full list of tasks or just the ones assigned to a specific individual.
Messages integrate well with e-mail. Checkboxes allow the composer to limit the notification to only those project members that must view the message. However, the message is still available for viewing by all project members. The message may be associated with a milestone, but must be associated with a general category. Categories can be customized by the project manager with admin privileges. Files can be attached to messages where they are then uploaded to the file sharing area.
Writeboards are another product from 37 Signals that the site developers have integrated with Basecamp. They are basic text editors. Project members can comment on each writeboard. More importantly, they can edit and revise the text. Old versions are preserved and can easily be compared with a couple of clicks in a couple of checkboxes.
The whole UI is designed to be intuitive. Basecamp’s creators have employed AJAX— the combination of web programming languages that allow the most interactive aspects of the webpage to be loaded into the browser. This enhanced interactivity creates a user environment that provides instant visual feedback for most user actions, helping the user intuitively navigate, participate, and communicate with little to no training.
Basecamp is not the only project management system available. Microsoft Project is a popular choice. However, it requires a special server and client-side licenses for each project member. Basecamp is extensible to as many users as required at no additional cost. Microsoft Project also requires the use of the whole host of Microsoft Office products—something not well-suited for many projects.
There are other server side solutions similar to Basecamp. DotProject and PHProjeckt are both open-source project management systems. To effectively implement either, one would need server space that supports these tools and/or the IT staff to customize current server capacity. The same experienced IT staff would be necessary for troubleshooting. Basecamp provides its service for a monthly fee—meaning no upfront implementation costs. Any capacity or troubleshooting is taken care of at their end.
Conclusion
Few events produce such sudden, jarring changes in the urban landscape as natural disasters. But few other events also produce the same longing for a return to the security of the familiar, which often means returning to existing land-use patterns. In that contrast lies the source of the pattern of repetitive damage that afflicts many communities, whether the danger be from flooding, fires, violent storms, or the trembling of the earth. (Schwab, 1998)
If local governments are burdened with the duty recreate a functioning region, their planning capacity must increase. Where planning departments were stretched thin before the disaster, the capacity to re-imagine the region and fix past planning mistakes is not locally available.
The temporary insurgence of increased capacity from efforts such as the Mississippi Renewal Forum and the Governor’s Commission on Rebuilding, Recovery and Renewal is a good first step. Increased capacity must endure or local governments and planning staffs will be burdened with nice visions on paper—but little or no capacity to implement them.
Basecamp is not a tool reserved only for academic institutions. Other willing groups and individuals could use such a tool to help expand the Gulf Coast’s planning capacity during the long recovery ahead.
Source: Project Management for Planners (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1884829635?ie=UTF8&tag=implementthus-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=1884829635) by Clark, T.A. (2002)
Source: Post-Disaster Zoning Opportunities (notonline) by Schwab, J. (1998, August)
]]>
GMail Labs: Some crazy experimental stuff.Buried in your GMail settings is a tab for a raft of new features. Once you activate labs features, they’re much easier to access with a little green Erlenmeyer flask at the top of your GMail screen.