Comment by itsprofitbaron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by itsprofitbaron | Hacker News Reader

Reading your requirements specifically in relation to the procedures using “2 astronauts working outside the space station (called EV1 and EV2), plus a robotics operator inside, and other actions taken by mission control on the ground. All of this is happening in parallel. Sometimes EV1 may be working on a task where all the steps can be done independent of what EV2 is doing, while other times their steps are heavily intertwined. The same goes for robotic and mission control steps” it seems like you need a project management tool.

Whilst you’re currently using Microsoft Word for this, it would actually be much easier to do this using Excel (and create a Gantt Chart) OR you could use something like Asta Power Project[1] which is used in the Construction Industry as well as with Technology Organisations, Engineering, Manufacturing, Oil & Gas and Financial Services etc which rely on projects running in parallel.

The reason I recommended the Asta Power Project tool is because you can:

- Create accurate schedules easily using a drag/drop feature

- Have complete visibility over multiple projects in real-time

- Optimise your project resources

- Access powerful reporting tools

- ETC

I've actually used the Asta Power Project Software myself; it's pretty powerful and feature rich.

[1] http://www.astadev.com/products/asta-powerproject/

I agree that most of your requirements seem to have a lot in common with project planning tools that are commonly used to plan and manage software development with traditional methodologies. Microsoft project is the classic example, though industry trends seem to have made it a low priority for them.

All of these tools focus on creating gantt charts or similar, with independent subtasks that can be reliant on other tasks, broken into subtasks, group within barriers (milestones). They help enormously when you need to insert things or reorder stuff.

I've never seen one used to incorporate the actual detailed instructions for completing the task, generally because part of the task is figuring out how to do it. But I'd be surprised if you looked at a few different project management applications that there wouldn't be one or more that could be used that way. If nothing else you probably would be able to use the task description that's usually very short to include an arbitrary amount of text.

The biggest challenge might be in getting a report formatted to your liking at the end of the process with all the details nicely formatted. Most of these systems provide a great deal of extendability, so you might need to have some minimal development work done in terms of a custom report format. Or maybe not - these are enterprise systems that are usually loaded with special case features.

Thanks for this reference. I'll definitely take a look at Asta. As for Excel: yes there are some advantages to Excel, but it is not particularly easy to handle numbered lists within it. We need to be able to easily over voice communications explain where the crewmembers should go as the plans change on the fly, i.e. "EV1 must perform page 36 steps 15-27 prior to EV2 performing page 34 steps 1-10."

You can use the 1st column for numbering the steps

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