16 Days: Working in Groups

Today's Six Hour Startup was near my house on the Microsoft campus today. So, despite the fact that I'm pretty busy, I stopped over to check out the last few hours. It looked like this one was more successful than the last one, but it still seemed like the group didn't work together as well as they could have. I think in-project communication was better this time (probably helped by the fact that it wasn't in a noisy bar), but it could have been better still.

In many ways, a six hour startup is like a microcosm of a real company with some of the same problems on a smaller scale. A whiteboard might work when you only have six hours and I know of at least one startup doing all of their project management using Post-It notes, but I keep seeing signs that I'm on the right track -- that there's a need for something better than a whiteboard but not as large or complicated as a typical project management or task tracking system and which is aimed at small business and other small groups. I'm also currently leaning toward calling the product itself "Groupthink Projects." That's not definite by any means and I'm interested in your thoughts.

And, on the project itself, right now, I'm still in the midst of a stage where I've written a lot and everything's broken. My plan is to emerge from that stage sometime tomorrow.