Do you love the new Project Plan feature?

Question

We are preparing a survey to go to many Paratext users in an effort to find out why so few are using the plan. We don’t know if it is a matter of training, or motivation, or what.

But we would also like to collect stories from users of the plan who think it is great. Is that you? If so, we’d like to share your story with others so that they might start to use the plan as well.

If you don’t want to share here, please write to me directly at [Email Removed]

Thanks!

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dhigby
Language Technology Use Coordinator
SIL International

Answer 1

I’ve only recently started looking at the Project Plan, but have already seen one thing that will be an obstacle preventing many teams here in Papua New Guinea from using the feature. In languages where the church is more liturgical, teams often choose to translate the next year’s calendar because they know that their is an expressed need for that Scriptures to be translated so they can be used. These passages are often just parts of a book or chapter. The Project Plan doesn’t allow for segments smaller than the chapter to be designated.

anon307241

Comments

There are a number of things that need to be improved in Paratext to make it work well for projects that target Scripture selections. We are outlining a proposed new feature that targets publications. You would select your target publication, and then all of the processes will help you to focus on completing that.

This is only a concept that the Prioritization Committee will be considering in October. It has not yet been planned.

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Is there a way to “vote” on this new proposed feature, dhigby? Would it
help to know how many people find the lack of it a hindrance?

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Hi dhigby, Paratext is a great tool and the new Biblical Terms Gues-feature in pt9 is a great time saver. The Project Plan feature in our context I think is overkill. As a small team who are together all the time, we can simply plan orally, write it down and manage progress this way. To put that into the project plan module is overhead that creates extra work. So we have not see the need for it. Our oral/paper planning works fine for us. I think what would be a great feature to have is a ‘predictor’ similar to the Samsung keyboard prediction in android. Having typed The Kingdom of God several times, if I type The Kingd , right there Paratext could provide me with the full key-term and with right-arrow it is copied in there. Now if this were ‘context’ sensitive, meaning in the parables of Jesus one would expect The Kingdom of God to appear often, this could be a great context-sensitive prediction tool, really speeding up the work (in principle). Another feature that would be a great innovation is the ‘read-it-out-loud’ feature that Acrobat Reader has for instance. Can you develop the (AI) technology to make Paratext read out loud the text (be it with a robot voice)? Can we have a deep-learning tool that is able to analyse all the text databases, including scripture, and come up with a pronounciation function ? That would open the door of semi-literate church member to become involved in testing in an early stage. Right now we can only test (without recording) with the very limited number of literate people there are. Going through the laborious process of recording a book after it has been transated JUST for the testing phase, is a huge investment of time. Knowing that it will need to be redone anyway after the testing and final checking makes us skip that and base our testing on the written/printed text only. I hope you find these comments helpfull dhigby.
goodgoan

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goodgoan,

Some teams use the autocorrect feature in Paratext to simplify the typing of common terms. You could define in an autocorrect file that when “Kingd” is typed Paratext will automatically correct or change it to “Kingdom of God”.

How do I set up the autocorrect.txt file? Helps

Create a new UTF-8 encoded text file in your project folder (e.g. C:\My Paratext Projects\XYZ) and name the file: autocorrect.txt. You can do this in Notepad by using File \> Save As, typing autocorrect.txt in the File name box, and selecting UTF-8 from the Encoding drop-down list in the Save As dialog. Open the file in Notepad and add the changes you want to make, in the form "word\-\-\>changed word". Do not add leading or trailing spaces unless you intend spaces to be part of the "word" you t…

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Hi goodgoan,

Thanks for your suggestions. I’d like to reply to the project plan not being needed, in favor of your oral/paper planning process.

I agree that the SIL base plan was overkill. That is why the LT department took it over from the translation department and revised it significantly. You can take a look at the new SIL Compact Base plan here: https://paratext.org/support/learning/project-plans/sil-compact-plan/ and you will find it much simpler, but know that this plan must be applied from Paratext 9.

What a project plan can give you that paper can’t is the knowledge of where any chapter is at in the translation process. Your consultants, your language program manager, and your archivist to the DBL can know at a glance where a given book is at in the process. Whether it has been consultant checked, or community checked. Thinking beyond that, at some point, the progress.bible website will be able to accurately show what percentage of the Bible is complete in a given language from the information inside Paratext.

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dhigby:

and you will find it much simpler, but know that this plan must be applied from Paratext 9.

Hi dhigby, does this effectively mean that all Paratext (SIL) users will be obliged to adopt this plan, meaning this ONE way of working ? I find that hard to believe. It seems like a straightjacket approach that will be counterproductive. As a proposition, or basis or starting point, yes, but as a mold to be forced into? At the moment I am using P9 without a plan, and it is working fine. So it seems we still have a choice, or is this going to change after the beta phase is over ? Anyway, I think it a bad idea to use software to force a certain way of working on teams. Work-situations and opportunities are just too diverse. The best you can do, I think, is offer a good starting template, which is what is happening, right? It would be a pity to not be able to use the wonderfull new features in Paratext 9 because it comes with a straightjacket.

goodgoan.
ps (some futher thoughts) : You wrote : What a project plan can give you that paper can’t is the knowledge of where any chapter is at in the translation process.
-Well, I am not interested in that information because we are working on a book by book basis. Once a book is drafted, the translators will tell me it is drafted, and so we move on. For some maybe a good feature to have, but not needed in our case. Especially if the internet internet connection is slow or absent, it makes no sense to drive several miles and try and do a dayly send-receive to the internet. It is much more efficient to do send-receive to the internet once a book is ready for the consultant to look at. Do the send-receive effort just once. And then when the consultant emails he has looked at the text and has put some questions in the remarks, we colect these via another send-receive, ect ect.

As a rule, when a book is ready for checking, I email the consultant (who is expecting my email because we have already planned the checking sessions) that send-receive has been done and he/she can now start working on the text. Sort of give him the green light.

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Hi goodgoan,

First of all, lets not start any rumors about Paratext 9. Nothing is changing with Paratext 9 and the project plan. You can use it, or you can decide not to use it, just as in 8. There is a small change to Paratext 9 that prevents our new SIL Compact plan from being backwards compatible with 8. This was a change to make the plan more flexible and easier to use.

Secondly, in two years of training people to use the project plan, the first thing I say is that it MUST be customized for the team’s processes. But we do want, for the sake of comparison, to have all projects within a given organization to be using the same number of stages. Keep the stages, adjust the tasks as you see fit. What you are given in the base plan is an excellent guide for good translation process.

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ffffyyyuuuuwww, sigh of relief. Thanks dhigby. Ergo, the project plan is there as a feature for those who like it, for those who do not want to use it, no problem. Have a great week.

Answer 2

Hi dhigby,
I’m not sure if I can say that I love the Project Plan feature, but there are certainly some things that I do love about it.

I love the ability to assign things to different team members, so that there is never a time when they are not sure what they could be working on. I really like the way it handles Basic Checks. Rather than having to run Basic Checks just to find out if there are issues, the Project Plan shows me right away how many issues there are with a quick and easy way to jump in and make those corrections. This helps our team keep up with the issues as we go along, and it makes it easy for the translators to begin to spot these problems on their own.

Not many in my location are using the tool. But I think that with a few changes, it could become something that really helps teams to be consistent in their work and could greatly assist in their planning.

Answer 3

There are a lot of great features in the Project Plan tool. I like the way it guides translators to do the various checks.and allows us to track progress. However there are some features to the tool which I believe must be improved before it is widely adopted.

• Bulk assignments of roles. Progress will not be recorded unless tasks are assigned. The fact that assigning tasks is quite click intensive is a big barrier to assigning tasks.
• More intuitive Chapter Completed checkoff. In order to encourage timely checkoff of progress at the chapter level, there needs to be an easier way to indicate that a translator has finished a chapter. Translators should not need to open the dialog and click the little + button to show the chapter is finished.
  (I would suggest that if a chapter is assigned to a user, then a chapter completed checkbox should be visible to them as they are editing. They could easily check it without opening the large dialog. I believe this was a feature of the old PT7 progress plan tool. I’d like to see it revived.)
• Chapter-level checks. Along with the above we need away to guide translator’s to fix validation check issues as chapters are marked as complete.
  (For us, one aspect of editing includes making sure the text passes all basic checks. I suggest that as a chapter is marked complete, an Icon indicating that would turn red if the chapter does not pass all of the validation checks applicable to that Stage. Ideally links to open the appropriate checking tools and inventories would also be provided, as well as an option to pass on the checks to the next stage or task if necessary. This might be implemented using a configuration option for tasks: Must pass validation checks.)

I believe that implementing the above three features would definitely help Project Administrators and Translators and result in more productive use of the tool.

A few more wishlist items:

• Hyphenation validation. We need a a check to see if hyphenation has been completed in the Wordlist tool. For many languages a hyphenation list is essential before typesetting can be done. Along with that, Search and and Sorting on the hyphenated word list, and bulk uncheck of approvals.
• Character and Punctuation Sequences checks. I often receive “completed” projects and find the translators never clicked the Character Sequences and Punctuation Sequences check boxes in the respective inventories. As soon as you click the sequences, you will generate thousands of more issues that must be addressed by the team. A way of enforcing that sequences have been validated is needed.

Answer 4

I second the comment about bulk assigning. Maybe for a given stage there would be a box that selects “this book only” or “all books”.
I also would really like to see the dates that an administrator can enter for each stage be connected to the individual “My Tasks” page as “task deadline dates”. There are so many tasks to deal with that translators are overwhelmed with multiple assignments on multiple books, especially if they have to remember when to complete each task. Right now this is what’s keeping me from using the Project Plan, even though I have set it up. I was hoping that the dates feature for administrators was for this very purpose, but recently learned that it isn’t available (yet!). To overcome this challenge I’m attempting to do a screenshot of their tasks and then manually write in deadline goals.

Thanks for asking!

Comments

I see the benefits of having target dates visible in each team member’s “My Task” view. Not everyone would want that but maybe they should.
You mentioned that team members get confused by having so many tasks assigned to them and that it is worse when they have assignments in multiple books. I am curious about that statement, since the “My Task” view only shows the tasks for the current book. The team member has to click on the blue “previous” or “next” links at the bottom of the window to see his or her tasks in other books.

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anon044949, you are correct, the view is only per book, so that helps break things up. I still would love to have an option for seeing the designated dates for each step. Thanks!

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jwagner,
You did notice that there are target dates available for stages at least?

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Yes, but I can’t figure out how to get those target dates to show up on “my task” page for the team members. I think it’s a feature that hasn’t been added yet. The dates are not obvious so it seems like they are intended for the administrator only. Is that how you understand it too?

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We should look at this. Other than the fact that I know those stage dates can be put in, I think the only place they show is on the progress chart.

Answer 5

Hi dhigby,

From Seed Company’s perspective, it is really too early to tell how the progress plan will be accepted and used. Our intent is to use it on every SC project. Nonetheless, we are quite a ways away from having all of our projects upgraded to P8. And it will probably take another year beyond that to get teams trained and progress turned on for all projects. It is sufficiently challenging to roll features out and get them in use. Seed Company has no centralized, field focused, technical group.

I am not surprised at all that the adoption rate is rather slow. In my mind this is a sign of a fairly complex roll out, not one of dislike of the tool. (I know some people will argue that P8 and the progress tool are not really that hard to roll out, but I will point out that those people are benefiting from systems already in place from previous large scale tech projects.)

There are still several practical issues yet to be resolved with turning on project plans, e.g.

1. multiple partner organizations each wanting their own plan to implemented,
2. organizational leadership believing that a single plan (or no more than a few plans) are being implemented worldwide when in actuality many changes are being introduced on the field,
3. poorly informed (often independent) consultants giving teams (and implementing) inaccurate advice,
4. the wiping out of progress data when a template is changed, and
5. non-field driven requirements and debates about what is needed at the organization’s headquarters.

This is not to blame anyone in particular, but it does show that the progress planning tool is a relatively elegant technical solution that opens up a new world of “political” issues.

Comments

Milt_Jones,

I did install a Portuguese version of the Seed Company plan on all of the projects in Mozambique. I spend two days training them on using the plan. I do not know if they are using the plan now a year later. They said no one has asked them to use it, so I don’t know if they feel the need to use it.

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Thanks, anon044949.

I’ll know more in time.

Milt_Jones

Answer 6

My next Paratext workshop in March 2019 is being Advertised as How to show Progress in one’s project. I have 4 teams signed up thus far. I see a few hinderances to using the “Project Plan”: 1) Most of the plans are so detailed (especially the SIL plan) that most people just pass it off as too complicated. 2) Most teams in West Africa have established plans after working with several consultants and NONE of these plans in our branch coincide with the SIL or UBS plans, so they all need to modify the plans which is time consuming. 3) As many steps are “dependent” on preceding steps, many translators are halted in their work cause the proceeding step as not been marked as completed.

One GREAT feature is that required checks are run for the teams which forces them to do the checks in order to have progress marked AND in order to proceed. However, I have noted that many teams seem to want to wait to do all the checks at the end. So if this is the case, they just halt their work as the Project plan will not let them proceed to the next step.

One work around to these “halts to translation” is to assign books the old way through Users, Roles, and Permissions, then have the Administrator do all the check offs as to the work done. And at the same time do the needed checks. There are some translators, even in the team I have worked most with, that are not very computer literate. So how to type in quotes correctly, or even apostrophies correctly (even after being shown numerous times) seem to be too much for them, So these always need to be corrected by the administrator or someone else. These translators who do not handle the computer very well can be descent translators, but they always need help with the details. So following the Project Plan is so detailed that it surpasses their computer ability.

I have noted that some teams just OK almost any word as correct without having checked them with a dictionary, often cause a Dictionary does not exist. So just having checks is not enough, but the checks need to be done correctly with the “solving” of the problems also being done correctly. Some teams (or I should say most teams), do not know how to solve many of the problems that Paratext finds. So I recommend people to attend at least 2 or 3 Paratext workshops in order to learn the correct procedures. Also Paratext does not require each team to have a good dictionary as a base. This needs to be encouraged more at a Branch level or at a Translation Consultant level. I believe that such is critical in order to have a good, consistent translation.

Well, those are my thoughts at the moment.

Dan
LT consultant, WAF

Comments

anon430981:

One GREAT feature is that required checks are run for the teams which forces them to do the checks in order to have progress marked AND in order to proceed. However, I have noted that many teams seem to want to wait to do all the checks at the end. So if this is the case, they just halt their work as the Project plan will not let them proceed to the next step.

I think this is actually one of the things that would make the biggest difference if it were changed. I would like the choice to make Basic Checks optional at certain stages. Ideally there would still be a step where the translator confirms that they have looked through the errors, but they would not be required to resolve them all before proceeding. Our translators are able to resolve about 70-80% of errors on their own. But for those especially confusing errors, we would not want that to keep them from making progress on other tasks, since most Basic Check errors can be resolved at the end of the book without causing too much interruption. Having to wait for an administrator to ‘Postpone’ those checks isn’t ideal for us.

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There should be an option to “postpone” any check until a later stage.This should show up when you are hovering over the line with the check.

Screenshot 2019-02-20 07.20.11.png848×420 24 KB

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Teams do have the option to “Deny” errors. We recommend this to our teams for any errors that they cannot resolve on their own. Of course, some teams overuse this feature but this is corrected when they are next in town.

Blessings,

Shegnada James

Language Technology and Publishing Coordinator, SIL Nigeria

Text Processing Specialist – Complex Script, GPS, SIL Intl

Skype: Shegnada.james.

[Email Removed]

+1 972 974 8146

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To expand on what anon848905 has said, in my training on the Project plan I tell people to seek help in resolving checks that they don’t understand. If work is going to stop before they can get the technical help then they need then go ahead and postpone the check, but have a plan to get assistance from a Language Technology specialist.

In the current version of the Project Plan feature, the only way to make a check “optional” is to remove it from the plan, and to run that check manually just as we did before the Project Plan feature was introduced.

It is not best practice to leave all the checks till the end of a 10 year project. We want to encourage teams to work at the checks little by little over the life of the project. Dealing with 10,000 errors at the end is a mind numbing experience.

Using a Project Plan brings many benefits that teams can benefit from today, even if their knowledge of Paratext is limit. In fact the idea was that the Project Plan would be a way of sharing with other teams more of what the power of Paratext can do for them. Who could you talk to organize more Paratext training in your area?

anon044949
SIL International
Language Technology Consultant

Answer 7

The plan should be for the team and not the team for the plan. We had to spend hours on just one project to liberate the sample SIL plan: you shall not do Y before you have done X… Well, life and work does not always run that way. Today we cannot do X because the internet is down, so why not do Y for now?

Also we found that the definition of the plan gives us space for notes, but the end-user who has to tick-off what has been done, can only see these for a few seconds by mouse-over. And all tasks look alike…

We have assigned our own internal numbers to not get lost in all those tasks. And we had a desaster because one office computer GUI is set to French and our plan was written in English - and nothing came over to the French. A better default would be to show the other language, rather than to show nothing… We had not even realized that for this level of admin there could be different languages.

I personally bet that there is a lot of hesitation to use this tool, because it has a hint of “big brother is watching you - from afar”. Seems many projects are struggling with (reasonable?) time-frames set by donours or not-be-with-the-local-team-deciders. So the tool is totally focused on “success” and on ticking off tasks. It does not show the overall work and effort that went into a project. So maybe team Z did spend 12 hours, struggling to settle some critical key term issues. And The Plan just shows “nothing”.

You can tell that I do not love the plan at all. I love my wife. But it is muchly more powerful than the limited-to-unreasonable-eight-steps in PT7. So we are using it - but we have spent hours to hack it so that it serves us and our local team.

(And we are using paper-follow-up-sheets, because The Plan can only handle entire chapters, and life does not work that way, and interruptions, weekends, travel, team-cooperation mean that work on 55 verses needs to be documented somewhere, even if the entire chapter has got 62 verses.)

So in summary, there is much potential in this new tool. We are using it. And I thank you for listening and for that upcoming survey.

hth

Comments

I’d like to work with you as we define a new and improved version of the SIL Project Plan. I appreciate your commitment to work with this tool despite its deficiencies. There is one helpful improvement that will be implemented soon in 8, but we’d like to know how else we can improve it.

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Yes, if you want even more input, fine. You want this here in the forum, or off-group?

Here is a fundamental question:

Is the tool really meant as a project-control, as in “the tool is trying to control every single task, and who can do what and in what precise order” or was it maybe originally designed to be a reporting-tool and some (unwanted) dynamic has crept into it?

I would be much happier with a very “open” reporting tool. One that does not force me to “lie” to the organisation in order to keep things pretty, just to produce “easy statistics for the leaders”. Or to release the next batch of funding…

In our location, and especially during training and “early days” the team works in small groups. Only one person may be on the keyboard and may be logged in as the PT8 user. But who did the work? And how to report such complexities?

And there are a few tasks where the order matters, but there are many where it does not matter and then there are even exceptions where it would have mattered but (somebody was absent) and a project needs to find work-arounds (but cannot even report that back to the person in charge, if the tool is too strictly configured).

So maybe there could be a setup-wizzard (maybe there is, I cannot remember) which would ask a few dozen questions about the preferred method of work in a given project and would set the defaults accordingly (and still allow for the reporting of exceptions).

So depending on what this tool is fundamentally meant for (control and reports or mainly reports) it will be a success or not. I believe you cannot control something as important and people-based as translation by a simple tool like this. There is always more going on (in a project and in an office) than a translation editor (and PT8 is a very nice translation editor with added bell and features) can even know about. All my input would be for the reporting side of things only.

So they blew another deadline! Yes, but the roof has been ripped off by a storm, where do we tick the box for that?..

There needs to be a box for free text entry as a minimum for each element, when you want honest and true and relevant communication through this tool. And probably you need a versioning, like we have for the main text, for when deadlines or project-plan-details get changed, so that previous information does not get lost. SIL is preaching for years “there is change happening all over!!!” so you need to build non-hacking tools for changing the plan as needed.

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In the traditional SIL system, every team reports their progress at least once a year and makes course corrections in a planning process. With the project plan, this makes progress transparent to the manager. If I were an administrator, I would not really want to wait a whole year to discover that the project has gone off the rails. This is pure and simple management sense that you will find in most organizations. If a team is not comfortable with their manager knowing their rate of progress, then there are some trust issues or a bad manager. I would advise them to resolve these issues before applying the project plan.

Secondly, we recommend that all teams make the project plan their own. Keep six stages (for our corporate statistics), but modify the tasks to match your approved working process. The SIL plan is only a guide that follows the translation department’s best guess at a workflow. If you want you can take every single task in the plan and set it to: “As soon as work on this book starts”. You have my complete endorsement to do so!

Yet, I think that you will find there are many logical ordering constraints in the tasks. It would never make sense to test a text for comprehension before it was gone over by the team, or to team check a text that has not been drafted. So, the fact that some tasks are greyed out is supposed to be helpful. Why? Well, if all the tasks are presented to you at once, you’d be looking at a list of 60+ tasks that are asking to be done now, when there is no way you can do them yet. Tasks that are greyed out get hidden from the user to keep them out of focus when they should be focused on the next task.

The existing SIL plan is far too limiting – preventing people from doing things they should be able to do – such as moving a chapter from stage 1 through stage 6 before the whole book is completed. We are aware of this and are both revising the plan and waiting on a new task feature coming out soon that will fix this issue.

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dhigby:

In the traditional SIL system, every team reports their progress at least once a year and makes course corrections in a planning process. With the project plan, this makes progress transparent to the manager. If I were an administrator, I would not really want to wait a whole year to discover that the project has gone off the rails. This is pure and simple management sense that you will find in most organizations. If a team is not comfortable with their manager knowing their rate of progress, then there are some trust issues or a bad manager. I would advise them to resolve these issues before applying the project plan.

Dear @dhigby, the above sounds like maybe a direct reply to my last post just above, even if not tagged as such. I thank you for this new batch of explanations and ideas for best practises.

Indirectly I read from your answer that the Project Plan is meant to work as a reporting tool from the perspective of the ground-staff on a certain project. And possibly as a project-control-tool for a person who is in charge of managing (several) projects. Since personally I find myself in a certain not-totally-traditional-SIL-situation I have the freedom to adapt this Project Plan. This was a lot of work initially and we keep finding that “we got the plan not-quite-right” and need to keep fine-tuning it as the project advances. Doing this by distance would probably very frustrating. And having a locked-up plan or a remote-controlled plan even more so.

I had to smile about your input about transparency and trust. I agree on each sentence, they way you have written it. But I would add that “If I were a project manager, I would not wait for an entire year either and I would hardly stare at ticks in tables, I would phone my teams a lot (if visiting were not possible) and would always want to know a lot about the people and the context, not just the actual “progress”.”

Again, the Project Plan is much better than the previous tool. And the more it will be used with “love” where there is hierarchy and/or results-based-management and/or funding-based-management, the more it will serve the ends and keep everybody informed and happy.

Another personal feedback: graying out would be fine for me, hiding stuff would not be fine. Each personality is different. I believe if an organisation wants the teams to be involved and “owing” their projects, it should consider giving every team member a chance to see the entire work and their own part/contribution in this context. That would be transparency in the other direction.

You have my respect and best wishes for your willingness to take all the feedback for the shaping of the next versions and of improved plan-templates.

Answer 8

I really appreciate using the Project Plan feature. It’s helpful to guide the teams and for managers to see what has been happening. Most of my teams call it “The Blue Dot” for obvious reasons.

One point which I would love to have improved, if we want to specify the date that each book and stage is due I need to manually enter the date (which involves about 6 clicks) for each stage for each book for each language. That’s A LOT of clicks. Surely it could be done more simply. I would love just to enter the finish date for each book, and Paratext would automatically enter when each stage for that book should be done by.

Answer 9

Hi dhigby,
Yes, I really like the Project Plan feature. I set it up to follow the procedure that we use with our team. Team members check off their tasks when they have done them, and this opens the text for editing by the next person and closes it for that person who has just finished their task. As a result, as administrator I no longer have to carefully check who has access to a particular passage. It also helps me to see quickly where a particular passage has got to. I also like it that you can put various Paratext checks in the different stages. This makes sure that these checks are done at the appropriate times.

Right now the Project Plan feature allows team members access to editing a particular passage or closes it off for editing. What I’d really like to see is that in addition to that, the adminstrator could use the Project Plan to allow or disallow team members to add notes. This would mean that a team member would not be able add notes until a particular passage is ready to be commented on.

I like how flexible the Project Plan feature is, allowing us to use our own stages, rather than squeezing us into someone else’s model.

Thanks.

Jock

Answer 10

Thanks anon044949, We will give that a try.