New Rule: management by spreadsheet

Actually, this is an old rule. Managing everything using a spreadsheet is very 80's (I would have said 70's, but I don't think Visi-calc was being used for number-less and formula-less lists much). The simple list of tasks across a team of people was more challenging to manage than it should have been - not to mention the reporting of the status to a broader audience, before the acceptance of a simple spreadsheet... Even then - sharing? ugh... the email chain of attachments begins... anyway... I swear I didn't want this to be a podium... just a simple sample of a cool Project Status report I saw today... From the Zend development team (the PHP company). This spreadsheet they use shows the status of each framework component in their product - and since it seems to be a broad community of developers, the Google spreadsheet platform is a great fit for both the collaboration and the publishing of status to their whole user community... use this one as a guide if you're trying to organize a team of remote developers (or those sitting close enough to smell your coffee or hear your ear buds...