I’ve been looking at all of the projects that I have and the number of burners there are for my efforts.
In the past week, I realized that I needed a consolidated plan with defensible, risk-managed timelines for getting to where I want to be on New Years Day, 2011: Launching a family of interoperability-centered tutorial, test-fixture, and reference-implementation projects around document formats and their processing. (Hmm, short enough for an elavator speech but not something I would be able to recite at gunpoint. Needs work.)
I have gathered my envisioning into a spreadsheet that keeps my commitment and my management of it in a structure that holds my vision in existence. Here is the finish line and, at the bottom, where I am standing right now:
This is a high-level perspective. I blocked out the calendar weeks and arranged more-or-less week-sized chunks in which to make headway along four tracks. Since I am a solo developer, this is enough for me to follow and use as an instrument for keeping my eye on critical setbacks and interdependencies that I must keep my attention on. There’s an opportunity for some Personal Kanban and Personal Software Process.
The OpenDocument Format continuation work is related to my current involvement on the OASIS ODF and OIC Technical Committees, as well as the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34 WG6 working-group for ODF maintenance. As ODF 1.2 moves toward ratification as an OASIS Standard in early 2011, there is a hiatus that allows me to devote more attention to Interoperability and Conformance and the alignment of the ISO/IEC and OASIS efforts.
The blog, web, and development system (Centrale) efforts have been identified here in a piece-meal fashion. This three-track view provides my first projection of a coherent feasible structure on those activities. There will be many opportunities for adjustment and course-correction as progress is made and details of further steps are reviewed.
In simply arranging these activities, I found how to avoid a situation in which I was retiring Compagno and in a sudden-death gap on being able to move everything I needed to the Windows Home Server. This was definitely sky-diving without a parachute. What I had not seen until I placed the activities in this form, is that Quadro, my Tablet PC, can mirror Compagno perfectly and also assist in verifying how migration from FrontPage to Expression Web can be accomplished while preserving practices that serve me too well for them to be abandoned without a fight.
I have also noticed, already, how having my eye on New Years Day gets me out of bed in the morning, excited to make further headway on these activities.
I will be reporting results and updates here on the week-by-week progress. And, for those playing along from home, here’s the tracking document on-line: