Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Category: Agile

A Production Backlog

October 1, 2024 /

Over the past few years my production cycle – that’s the work I do between finishing the story and pressing the publish button Amazon, Kobo etc. – has been pretty ad-hoc. As I finish a story, I think about editing, covers, and sales copy.
That wasn’t really a problem when I was publishing a novel a year.

This year it’s been two novels, and I have on my desk a novella and a short story collection waiting to finish that production cycle, with another novella planned to finish by the end of October, and a third one by Christmas.

Those two published titles I mentioned last week still aren’t published!

I had an inkling this might be a problem when the manuscript for The Corpse in the Courtyard sat gathering dust for nearly two months before I got to the final read through.

It’s a problem I’m glad to have. It means I’m starting to hit some of the word count and project goals I’m aiming for. It also means my production schedule needs more planning than just an ad-hoc set of activities.

Managing Chaos

March 30, 2023 /

It’s been a while since I posted, and directly related to the way my world seemed to spin out of control in February and March.

As well as closing down one project, and starting another, I was asked to help manage the response to an RFP. It didn’t sound much, but these things never do. Suddenly I found myself juggling three projects across three time zones and trying not to double or triple book meetings. It’s all very well to suggest using an online calendar, or paper to manage this all, but the overhead is horrible. I know, I tried both and I wanted a simpler option.

I’ve written about the Obsidian application several times on this blog, and no surprise, we’re going there again. One of the three projects I mentioned is tracking the progress of several thousand line items on a shared Excel spreadsheet. I got a handle on my piece of that by building a quick tracking board using the Obsidian Kanban plugin. I have about twenty distinct items in flight at any one time and finally I know the status of each one.

The calendar was a little harder. Eventually, I went really basic. Using the Obsidian Canvas feature, I built a column for each day of the week, then added a note for each meeting with the time, description, and a color code for the type – client or personal. Because Obsidian synchronizes seamlessly across all my devices, it’s a quick glance to see if a specific date and time are free.

For the moment, I think the chaos is under control. One of those three projects finishes at the end of March so the need for coordination should become less. Except you know how it is with chaos. It’s never completely tamed.

A Sad Farewell

June 30, 2021 /

If you’ve worked with me on projects over the past fifteen years or so, you’ll know I’m a very vocal proponent for Atlassian’s Jira application. We use local server and cloud versions of Jira, Roadmaps, and Jira Structure in my consulting business for managing projects, and longer term planning.


In the past year, leading up to this week there have been several apparently disconnected events that are causing us to review our planning toolsets.
As the pandemic gained ground last year, and many of our clients moved almost all their staff to remote working environments, we also saw a shift toward Microsoft’s M365 platform, and increasing use of the Microsoft Planner tool.
Around the same time, Atlassian announced their products will be moving to a Cloud only model. As of February 2024 there will be no support for server based versions.
This week, ALMworks, who develop Jira Structure announced their cloud pricing. When I read the email, I had to sit down. For a small company like ours, the cost looks prohibitive in terms of what we pay versus the benefits.


Every one of our clients is involved in Healthcare in some way. We are subject to the same HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance regulations for privacy and security as our clients.


This next point may be significant when it comes to some of the client trends I mentioned above. Microsoft is very clear they are HIPAA compliant with their M365 platform. Atlassian’s Cloud Terms of Service prohibit submitting or receiving “Sensitive Personal Information” on its Cloud Products, which includes “patient, medical or other protected health information regulated by HIPAA.” Ryan Ozawa wrote a very good piece on this at the end of last year.
There are companies like Valiantsys who offer HIPAA compliant hosting of Jira, but again there’s quite a cost impact,


Taking everything together, we are currently reviewing exactly what our requirements are for management and planning, starting with, is Jira overkill?
And what does this have to do with writing?


Well, a kanban board helps keep me focused so I actually finish a story and don’t jump into the next bright shiny idea. The solution there may be as simple as index cards on a white board.


I’ll post updates here as we make decisions.

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