Intellectual way to track projects in OmniFocus

[Fritz58]

I delegate a lot. I use OmniFocus and need your advice. For example, I delegated "Prepare news and articles for the website till 01/10/2012" project to my marketing director. I put the project as "Prepare news and articles for the website till 01/10/2012" and the next action as "John: Prepare news and articles for the website till 01/10/2012" with @Waiting context. The project looks the same as the next action. I don't care about the next action and need the result.

Is there any more intellectual way to track delegated projects in OmniFocus???!

[mcogilvie]

I delegate a lot. I use OmniFocus and need your advice. For example, I delegated "Prepare news and articles for the website till 01/10/2012" project to my marketing director. I put the project as "Prepare news and articles for the website till 01/10/2012" and the next action as "John: Prepare news and articles for the website till 01/10/2012" with @Waiting context. The project looks the same as the next action. I don't care about the next action and need the result.

Is there any more intellectual way to track delegated projects in OmniFocus???!

Sure:
"Waiting for John re website news and article"
Context: @Waiting OR @Delegated Projects (which you might like as a context)
Due: 1/10/2012

The key, of course, is that it's not your project, but John's project.
Of course, you might have a project, depending on your trust in John, like
"Ensure John meets 1/10 deadline on web updates project"
Web updates is still his project, but you have your own.
In your project, you might have reminders to check periodically with John
on his progress. On the other hand, you might have that check built into a
regular meeting and only need a single waiting-for on your list.

[Barb]

Sure:
"Waiting for John re website news and article"
Context: @Waiting OR @Delegated Projects (which you might like as a context)
Due: 1/10/2012

The key, of course, is that it's not your project, but John's project.
Of course, you might have a project, depending on your trust in John, like
"Ensure John meets 1/10 deadline on web updates project"
Web updates is still his project, but you have your own.
In your project, you might have reminders to check periodically with John
on his progress. On the other hand, you might have that check built into a
regular meeting and only need a single waiting-for on your list.

This is really terrific advice! I like the "Projects Delegated" or "Actions Delegated" to be on a different list than my other waiting for items. That way they will really stand out and make it easy for you to see when you touch base with each individual periodically.

[goncalomata]

Is there any more intellectual way to track delegated projects in OmniFocus???!

Hi Fritz!
Other from the structure, you may want to pay some attention to the contents, to what they mean, to what you want them to do for you.

Maybe you just want to be reminded there's a project you want to follow in John's hands and that's it. No actions. It's a delegated project. It's on a list of projects under some area, for example. When completed, John would report "done".

But if John is late (or you're afraid he might be), you may dive into details so you gain better control. You want to follow the steps of completion - the intermediate tasks/deliverables. Let me made up an example from yours:

Imagine the project finishes when the "prepared news and articles" are sent to the webmaster in a ZIP file.
PROJECT: "News and articles ZIP file sent" (the notion of the last deliverable helps making the project itself more trackable)

Now imagine that for that to be achieved John had to, first of all, get the pre-news from someone before preparing them to be sent.

NEXT ACTION: WNF John (get pre-news from person x)
To track the steps, it must be easy to report "done" or "not done" for each.

Your example "Prepare news" doesn't sound very action-oriented... and that is a crucial point so what's on your system means something in terms of trackability and really helps you getting control over what's happening.

Goncalo