| You need to get organized immediately, new programmers or not. How I organize any messy/late project I've inherited successfully. Again, 6-10 project's I've inherited from incompetent/sociopath devs and made into lifelong customers who I like working with. This works. He needs some structure and routine and this will provide enough of it. He needs some consequence that while they're might not be another option besides him, there is a track record for him to keep and maintain. Don't threaten, ask him what he gets mixed up about a deadline being a deadline and how he can adjust his estimates. 1) Register for the free version of fogbugz 2) Put in each issue (one issue per case number/email) 3) Rank them from 1 (raging fire) to 7 (dont forget.. one day). Each ranking number is kind of how many weeks you need it in (realistically), or in how many weeks it will be completed. Ideally nothing should ever be a Priority 1 or 2. :) 4) Have individual discussions on each case, in each case, via email. This is the knowledge transfer from him into a central system should you add/change developers. 5) when you have enough information on each, rank where each is at. Analysis (what to do), Design (how to do it), Plan (who will do it when), Implement, Test, Launch, Support (bugs/wty) 6) If you can do #5 you can track everything anturally. Only communicate in Fogbugz. if it's not there, you can say everything needs to be touched on regularly. 7) Hook fogbugz up to your source code manager so each case can have the commits of each file tied to it an you start building a history of what's happening. If you need help figuring it out I might be able to lend you a hand off-line. |