Peter J. Jones has a really useful post on how he uses Org mode to do project planning. In his post he demonstrates some features of Org mode that you might not be familiar with. Chief among these is column view, which turns out to be really useful for visualizing and exporting data.
Jones begins by noting that the most important attribute of any project planning tool is that it use plain text. Use plain text and your data is never orphaned by lost or discontinued applications or by moving to a different platform. Org mode, of course, is one of the very best applications of this sort and is what Jones uses.
Jones starts his planning by listing the features of his project and then the tasks needed to complete each of the features. Once that’s complete, he can assign time estimates to each task. This is easy to do in column view and Org will automatically total the times for each feature and for the total project. Once this is done, he exports the results into a basic proposal for management or a client.
As he works on the project, he clocks his time on each task and, again, this is shown in column view along with the state of each task. His post has several screen shots that show the various views as he proceeds with the project. He also includes the raw org file for the project so you can see how he did things and how he set up the columns for column view1. It serves as an excellent go-by if you’re interested in doing your own project planning this way or even if you just want to see a nice example of using column view.
Footnotes:
Be sure to look at the raw file and the Org documentation on capturing column views to see how he produced the Estimates section of his proposal.