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Storybook 3.0 review
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Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 12, 2011 at 05:22 PM
To use Storybook as a project management tool sounds like a very interesting idea. I was actually wondering if this software could also be used for organising qualitative research material for the social sciences. E.g. perhaps characters don’t need to be just human characters in a story (such as a case study) but a character also could be an organisation or a technological artefact or anything else that is being studied.
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.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 12, 2011 at 05:45 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>E.g. perhaps characters
>don’t need to be just human characters in a story (such as a case study) but a character
>also could be an organisation or a technological artefact or anything else that is
>being studied.
Indeed, in my experimentation I used characters for our partner organisations in a project; each organisation has a manager and a deputy in the project and it really makes little sense to differentiate among them as they manage their subdivision of labour internally.
Interestingly, Storybook provides the possibility to create new “genders” for characters. I created the gender “organisation” and my collaborators are now depicted as friendly aliens…
Posted by Pavi
Oct 13, 2011 at 06:54 AM
Dr. Andus and Alexander,
Very nice that you find Storybook to be productive. And many thanks for suggesting the other uses!
The more I use it, the more I realize the power in its simplicity and cross-referencing. For example, tags can be used in a story to track a subplot that doesn’t warrant its own strand. But since they can attach to a character, location, or scene (individually or a stretch), they can be used for nearly anything. In project management or personal goals, this can fill in a lot of functionality. The memoria tool (tree view especially) also becomes much more useful as it visually represents relationships within data items by date. Personally, I think there should be an option for memoria without date to show relationships for tags, for example, over the course of a project.
It seems like we can use it in this manner as it is, and hopefully discover what changes to recommend to the developer to make it a more useful project management tool. If this could appeal to a broader audience, it would certainly also drive faster development.
There is a forum at the sourceforge page which includes bug reports and recommendations. I also would like to continue the discussion here to share our implementations, while reporting there could get the message out to other users.
Best, /Pavi
Posted by Pavi
Nov 4, 2011 at 10:47 AM
Hi, just wanted to mention that Marin has released version 3.1. It adds a number of features, including:
- horizontal orientation for Chronological view (I asked for this)
- button to remove a character’s life cycle (I asked for this), which could enhance the Gantt chart for project management
- easier to switch views, resize inside views
- “Reading view” to give a book style with table of contents
- Manual, including PDF
- hot keys
- more, listed here: http://www.novelist.ch/joomla/index.php/en/release-notes
The two I asked for, as well as the reading view, enhance the software significantly. The only things I really want now are minor: 1) The ability to make a scene without a date, and 2) Option to hide a scene from the book (for backstory purposes).
Best, /Pavi