(Engineering) Project Management in Obsidian

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https://ltroj.medium.com/engineering-project-management-in-obsidian-e6aade82dfff

Some time ago I got into the situation to quickly set up a functioning project management in the engineering field. I decided to do the whole thing in Obsidian and have not regretted it so far. After gaining some experience I wrote an article outlining the most important lessons learned. I hope it is useful for one or the other!

I’m also interested in your experiences, so feel free to share your techniques and experiences.

Table of contents

  • Introduction (you can skip this part)
  • :question: Prevent analysis paralysis
  • :building_construction: Structuring projects in the vault
    • :file_folder: Folders vs :hash: Tags vs :mag_right:Dataview queries?
    • :flight_arrival: Adding a Landing page
  • :brick: Project blocks and milestones Kanban style
    • :date: Using the Projects plugin
    • :date: Using the Kanban plugin
  • :spiral_notepad: Project notes and metadata
  • :speech_balloon: Meeting notes
  • :busts_in_silhouette: Referring people (and resources)
  • :white_check_mark: Task Management
    • :ballot_box_with_check: Task lists using Dataview
    • :electric_plug: Checklist items on steroids — the Obsidian Tasks plugin
  • Final thoughts
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2

Thank you for sharing.

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3

I had put off investigating the Project and Kanban plugins and found your overviews of them, as well as the other sections of the write up, super helpful.

4

I’m glad my write-up was of some help. Projects and Kanban are both great plugins, but it can be difficult to find the right one for a particular use case.

5

Looks nice. But for someone to set all this up from scratch will take them all day, right? (Being generous, I would, and have, gotten obsessed and spent a week or more tweaking similar setups)

A dedicated task/project manager app has this stuff out of the box. And is so robust. what happens when one of your project titles needs to change, and you decide that really it is a subproject of another project, and also you want to move half of its tasks/notes over to that other project?

In omnifocus I would 1. Change the title 2. Drag one project into another 3. Drag those tasks to the right project. It would take 20 seconds and nothing would break. I wouldn’t even need a second tab or pane.

Relying on dataview means having to update every instance of it, every time one of the fields or titles changes, or any other overhaul happens. It means having to describe, in code, what every dataview instance should be querying (even if your template gets you mostly there)

I could go on, and don’t mean to sound critical. I just want to save any one else the weeks Ive lost to building a project/task manager inside a plain text notes app

6

How do you get this styling (the box):

image
image918×440 85.8 KB

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7

This is a callout. Syntax looks like this:

> [!info]+ GOALS
> In this project....

That style of callout is from the Minimal theme. Its selected in the Style Settings plugin.

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