The Barest Essentials of Project Management & FileMaker Tips and Tricks

Sorry for the short notice—I couldn't get confirmation on the venue until just now.

This month we're mixing management with making. First, we're lucky to have our own Marc Ouellette share from his wealth of experience. Closely related to last month's topic, estimating, project managing is something that concerns us all, whether we're managing our own projects or projects for others.

Here's Marc's abstract:

Project Management is itself a Best Practice. Many clients will not pay for what they consider irrelevant to their ends. However the absence of project management methodology of some sort is often costly in dollars and good will on both sides.

I will emphasize “Scope, timelines, milestones and sign off”, recognizing that within the SOFA group there is a considerable range of project management expertise as applied to organizations and businesses from tiny to massive, with considerations of formality and culture correspondingly ranging from completely informal to “rules for everything”. The talk will pick up items in the last two SOFA presentations. Referencing Adam’s talk about what is billable and why, and will address the relevance of mediation if a project starts to sour.

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After Marc's presentation, we'll talk about what we do when we aren't managing: Make FileMaker databases. I'm looking for two or three volunteers to present either a FileMaker tip or a trick, or show how a particular problem was handled. If you've got some thing you'd like to show, send me a note either here on Meetup, or at info@exoteric.ca. If worse comes to worst, I've got a couple of things I can show, one of which will include a quick refresher on FileMaker security essentials followed by a very useful tip for handling record-level access in external files without jumping through hoops.