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Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?

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Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?

#41

Post by vanzorn »

TrevorAustin wrote: post #12

As 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…

Thirding Asana. Just set up a major series of teams and projects and hooked in Zapier for some automation with a ticket system (Teamwork Desk). While Asana isn't a CRM by any means, we're creating a workflow with Kanban and automation to capture the vital interactions with clients.

Asana has the added benefit of allowing the user to interweave non-project-specific tasks to achieve something of a GTD workflow. It really helps me to get every actionable item out of my head space and assign some kind of priority / responsibility / due date to it.

Asana Premium is a must for the flexibility with custom fields (https://asana.com/guide/help/premium/custom-fields)

Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?

#42

Post by oneplane »

Pretty much just JIRA and communication/storage apps on the side (like Slack and Google Docs). A lot of people seem to hate JIRA, but as long as you keep it simple and only keep some border requirements rigid, it's pretty sweet to work with.

Other setups I've worked with are Trello-style (but not actual Trello) kanban boards, be it a physical board or a board implemented in something else. In some projects it worked very well with GitLab and GitHub integrated project tools. As limited as they are, they are a great minimal way to workflow your stuff. Anything more complex than that is often in the wrong place and should most likely be managed at a different (non-engineering) level. Perhaps that is why JIRA works for us as well on most projects; we tend to not mix engineering and non-engineering stuff as they often have different needs where even small differences make for a bad combination in the same tool.

Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?

#43

Post by Benjamin_Dobell »

jaryd wrote: post #25
TrevorAustin wrote: post #12

As 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…

Second Asana. I've been using it for years and it has really improved tremendously over that time. There are definitely still many things missing (most notably for me is the lack of advanced markup in comments/conversations)... but it works very well for cross-functional collaboration and longer-term project management.

I've just started using Asana in the last month, the very first thing I noticed was how incredibly slow the interface is to respond. Dragging things around on a board is particularly painful compared to Trello or Github Projects.

I also find it incredibly annoying that when you add a card to a column, it adds it to the top of the column, rather than the bottom.

However, aside from those two annoyances, it does seems to offer a lot of useful functionality.

Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?

#44

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

Not a manager, just an engineer.

I was happiest when my team could just get by with GitHub issues. It was super simple and really easy to work with.

Eventually we used JIRA and Confluence, and it worked fine. Just make sure you keep workflows as simple as possible. I think there exists the temptation to add lots of constraints and requirements when creating and resolving issues, but that just raises the bar for getting actual things done. If reporting something takes more time than actually fixing the bug then your system is broken.

Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?

#45

Post by unixhero »

tootie wrote: post #13

I don't care what anyone else says, I always come back to JIRA. The basic usage is simple enough. Everything is customizable although you can shoot yourself in the foot if you overthink it. It's great at associating tickets in various relationships. It integrates very neatly with version control and CI systems. Anytime we try something simpler, we hit a wall and end up back with JIRA.

Yeah. And frankly I love making filters with jql. It really works.

Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?

#47

Post by dual_basis »

willart4food wrote: post #21

This is the system that I have developed through the years, it's simple, kind of low-tech, but it works: - 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:…

Imagining myself as one of the executives in this meeting, this all sounds absolutely awful, and I would be looking to leave as soon as possible.

Re: Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?

#50

Post by imirzadeh »

Phabricator!

It’s an open source software development platform can do pretty much ANYTHING you want and if you know PHP, you can add everything you need at low cost! It has task management, code repository, code review, team collaboration syatem, knowledge sharing and ...

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