- Meeting starts every Monday night, 5PM/end of business day - Meeting ends when it ends. Usually 1-2 hours, but at times till midnight - Only executives, one per department: so CEO, COO, CFO, SW Development, Marketing/Sales... no more than 5 max 7 people - A google spreadheet - Projects are ranked by importance: 1,2,3 and 4. 1 High, 2 medium, 3. low. 4 just placeholder for ideas - Projects must have a completion date of 3 months or less. If longer they get broken down into The above was the original, these days I like to ADD to the above BASECAMP project management for any and all communications between anyone involved. Everything's public, from commitments to comments, if it's not in there, it didn't happen.
Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?
#22The great thing about having our own tool (which we also license to our customers but it's far from our main focus) is the possibility to adapt exactly to how our company works. It is integrated into everything (integration and offline are our strengths) and when something doesn't fit, it usually takes a few days until a solution is found (or it is already implemented for a customer). It even has a lunch module which adds calendar entries in our outlook when we say we are attending a company lunch, and that is integrated into navision which takes care of the accounting side.
We also evaluated using JIRA at one point in the history. IMHO, if JIRA fits, go and use it, when not, you can bend it but that causes some headaches.
Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?
#23Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?
#24Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?
#25As an engineering manager, what I want most from a project management app is something that does a good job helping engineers on my teams collaborate effectively with non-technical departments. We use Asana for this right now and it works well, and at a previous employer we used Jira which also worked well. Done well, it means the team always has shared state about what the latest designs are, how far along various p…
Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?
#26Every business works differently, so all PM apps in their default config will match 80% of what you need, for 80% of businesses.
If a manager implements an app without customising it to the business, users will be frustrated, directionless and end up hating the app - see user comments in this thread!
Bespoking it to the business allows users to do their jobs with minimal interaction AND WITHOUT MICROMANAGEMENT.
Finally, without management buy-in (that's you!), without you actually using the inputs and outputs of it, it will fail - lead by example.
Hope this helps :)
Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?
#27Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?
#28Clubhouse is Trello where each card can is synced with a git branch. As you add and push, the cards move automatically.
This helps me as a developer, because the business is always up to date with the latest progress and all I need to do is follow the company's git workflow.
To see the cards move when you raise or merge a PR is magical.
There are other features like collecting tickets together into an epic, sub projects and integrations with logging and deployment tools. If you are the manager and you implement this in your org, you dev team will love you.
Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?
#29As a PM, my main focus is just to get people to update what they're doing and trying to assign, distribute, negotiate, and see tasks and dependencies that need to be done.
Asana - Amazingly good in the first few versions. But it started getting slow as they added more features. Back then I would use it even for trivial things like bug tracking, because the keys and controls were so intuitive.
Google Docs/Sheets - It does the job. It's got history and versioning. Low learning curve. It's very powerful at searching (you can link to a document and it will search the linked document as well). Sheets is mildly programmable.
It's missing some tricks like tagging people and tracking who is assigned to what, attaching files, and has a limited comment system. You can't really subtask, map dependencies, or do burndown charts with it.
Jira - Hated it. Its core purpose seems to be covering asses. It makes a PM look extremely productive. It makes late night and remote workers look productive. It logs what people are doing and logs issues and dependencies. Extremely useful for people who have agile contracts for another company. But actually managing people seems to be the lowest priority of the tool.
Pivotal Tracker - Lots of potential. If you're using full Agile, this is probably the best. It's probably too heavy if you have a team of two, but even then it works. I think the Epics handling is a little messy, but it's much better than the others.
Trello - good for assigning tasks to a group. Too light for managing a pipeline from design to dev to testing to approval. At some point, it acts like email, where people get too many messages and ignore a lot of them.
I'm considering experimenting more with Google Sheets and maybe even group Evernotes. The others are a bit too clumsy.
Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?
#30I know Jira and Confluence get a lot of hate but the companies I’ve worked for always seem to favor it and I’ve gotten very comfortable in there now. If I were at a company with 20 then Jira