I would love a kGTD styled app that could allow a team of people working on several different workstations to collaborate on a shared task list. Preferably, but not necessarily, in realtime.
<analogy>
By way of analogy, the problem I'm trying to model might be similar to what a restaraunt would want to use to visualize everything that's going on at any given time:
- The maitre'd checks in people and seats them; new project task.
- A waiter gets the orders and brings them to the kitchen; a set of new subproject tasks.
- One or more cooks prepares the food and hands it off to the waiter to bring to the table; the subprojects get checked off as they are completed.
- Dessert orders are taken, prepared, and delivered; a new round of subtasks created & completed.
- The party pays the tab and leaves; the project task is now done.
At any given time, there might be dozens of these tasks in process, and in for, say, the maitre'd to be able to accurately tell incoming people things like how long the current wait for a table is, they have to have a reasonably accurate sense of the current volume of all these tasks, how long they can be expected to take, etc.
Plus, the maitre'd needs to have enough info to be flexible, so that if Abe Froman (the sausage king of Chicago) shows up with his entourage, the restaraunt finds a way to both accomodate these unexpected priority jobs while still being as fair as possible to the people that were already being served or waiting to be served.
As a bonus, if this "restaraunt" variant of what I'm describing could do more "project management"-y things like resource allocation, scheduling, process improvements, infrastructure upgrades, etc, that's fine, but let's assume they already have systems in place for such things, and the unmet need to fill is primarily just visualizing day-to-day operations. For an individual, kGTD could do this pretty well, but it quickly starts to exceed its comfort zone when trying to coordinate things for people that are working very closely together like this.
</analogy>
Maybe this collaborative-GTD mode could work via the magic of Bonjour, sort of like how SubEthaEdit does for collaborating on text documents. I think that works via
the BEEP protocol, but
they're vague about that. Maybe it could work in a client-server mode, or it could some leverage syncing to iCal (and thus .Mac &/or Leopard's calendar server) to coordinate data across multiple peers. I don't so much care about how it gets implemented as long as it works well. :-)
This doesn't quite seem to be a job for OmniPlan, as I'm not really describing a tool for charting out resources and milestones and deliverables and schedules and that sort of thing. Much simpler than all that. Just a large volume of well-defined tasks, facets of which get handled by different people in different contexts, and providing a way to have a easy-to-manage and reasonably up to date view of the whole production at any given time.
If OmniFocus ends up being able to do this, super. If not, has anyone ever heard of software that does kind of work this way? I haven't been able to find anything closer than kGTD with iCal sync, which isn't really the same...