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

#1

Post by softwareman » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 12:42 PM UTC

I know there are tons and tons of PM apps. I wanna know if any of those drive your daily project management activities as (Engineering) Manager.

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

#2

Post by ghostmaree » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 1:31 PM UTC

Free Daily Accounts! http://ghostmaree.boards.net

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

#3

Post by DanielBMarkham » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 2:07 PM UTC

Notepad. Or any other code editor.

I wrote a book on extreme minimalist information management[1]. Notepad and git (along with the appropriate text tools, which might just be some shell programming) work just fine, as long as you know how to tag and organize stuff.

Even without the stuff I wrote about, what do you really need to know? 1) What work is there? 2) How much of it is done? 3) Who's doing what? 4) How are things going?

There's not a lot to it -- which is probably why you see fourteen million PM apps out in the wild.

I'd like to see PM apps make the transition that source control apps did to git. That is, moving from everybody-makes-an-app-they-sell-you to something bland, easy, free, highly configurable and interoperable -- and runs anywhere. There's no reason we can't have that.

1: https://leanpub.com/info-ops

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

#4

Post by osrec » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 2:11 PM UTC

We tried a bunch of PM apps in my company, but couldn't find ones that did time tracking and invoicing well. We just needed something simple - an app that would let us list our project tasks and tick them off as they were completed. Eventually we built our own for internal use. Some of our clients saw us using it and asked us to wrap it into a service - so we created https://usebx.com - we still use it internally, and it's serving us well (we're a team of 25).

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

#5

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 2:14 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#6

Post by Gorath » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 2:14 PM UTC

Emacs + org-mode has always served me well.

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

#7

Post by gravypod » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 2:18 PM UTC

The team I'm on currently uses JIRA but I would harshly recommend against using it. It's one of the tools on the belt of the Agile Clergy that is used to beat the peasant into submission.

The tool is expensive, constantly deteriorating in visual appeal, workflow, and support, and over complicates very simple tasks. The Agile Clergymen who work at my office boast it's integration abilities, it's high customization, and 3 charts it produces that inevitably say "You're not Agile enough" as being all one would ever need for a project management system.

In my opinion there are three main options right now.

If you're hosting an internal Software Development-only ticketing system that only the PM and the developers will interact with, and you are using GitLab, and you have the ability to host a robust GitLab server internally, I would recommend GitLab Issues [0]. It's free and open source and very integrated with the entire workflow even including time-tracking, gantt charts, etc. It's all bundled into what they're calling a Portfolio Manager [1] that has a bunch of other features you may want to explore as a PM.

If you want to use JIRA because the Agile mob is present within your organization it is a fine option so long as you either don't mind spending a very long time figuring out how the unnatural interface works and setting up a bunch of essentially needed "customization" then you can look into that. It even produces 3 pretty nice charts!

If you specifically need to take in issues and triage bug reports and feature requests then you may want to look into Redmine [2] or BugZilla [3]. Both are extremely dated but have been tried and successfully used by many large teams.

[0] - https://about.gitlab.com/features/issueboard/

[1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/3254

[2] - https://www.redmine.org/

[3] - https://www.bugzilla.org/

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

#8

Post by mxwsn » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 2:27 PM UTC

Notion has been wonderful for me as a personal project management app. My main use cases are organizing and juggling personal to-dos across several independent projects and growing knowledge bases for each project organically as I add complexity to computational pipelines and record experimental results (I'm doing a PhD). I switched from Evernote which to me was significantly weaker in linking individual notes into larger structures.

[0] https://www.notion.so

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

#9

Post by alanfranzoni » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 2:31 PM UTC

You didn't tell us what would you like to do with it. What is your problem? What kind of projects and team sizes are you working with?

Do you need an application, at all?

I would suggest you to devise a WORKFLOW that you like, and you build or choose a (probably small) app that fits your needs.

Personally, I rarely found PM problems (reporting, calculating effort spent vs remaining, record task completion) that require a lot more than a spreadsheet, but again, I don't know what you're trying to achieve.

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

#10

Post by lkrubner » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 2:32 PM UTC

After many years trying a vast variety of project management software, I've come to the conclusion that what matters most is the project manager, rather than the software. Nowadays when I consult with clients I advise them: "First, find a really good project manager, and then use whatever software they want to use." If you have a great project manager, and they prefer to keep track of everything on crumpled up napkins, then the whole team should be given an ample supply of crumpled up napkins. Great project managers are rare, but if you have a great one, you should let them set the parameters of project management for your project.

When you have a bad project manager, good software will not save you. This is my personal story of how things can go wrong:

-----------------------------------

At 2 PM we had a meeting scheduled to go over all of the tasks in PivotalTracker. John had promised Milburn that we would execute our work according to a project-management philosophy that the tech industry called agile. Agile software development, among many other aspects, focuses on the delivery of small, incremental improvements to software. It encourages self-organizing teams, evolving and continuous progress, and rapid response to challenges faced. The Celolot team would work two-week sprints, checking in at the end of each period to see where everyone was at.

Unfortunately, vague definitions of “done” haunted our progress. John read through a long list of tasks that had been assigned to Sital.

“Find all possible variations of ‘Close Date,’” John read from the screen. “Is this done?”

“Yeah,” muttered Sital. “Sure.”

His assurance meant nothing to me. Sital would never lie, indeed I was often surprised by his childlike honesty, but he lacked an appreciation for the many ways that software could break.

“How many variations have been tested?” I asked.

“Two,” replied Sital.

“That’s not enough,” I said.

“That’s enough,” countered John. “‘Close Date’ and ‘Contract.’ That’s all we need.”

“What about ‘Close’?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” John thought aloud. “What about ‘Close’?”

“I’ll see,” Sital responded somewhat robotically.

John marked it as done.

“Wait,” I objected. “That is not done.”

John turned back to Sital. “Do you think you can finish today?”

“Absolutely,” Sital assured us.

“Then I’ll mark it as done,” said John, returning to his screen.

“But it’s not done till it’s done,” I argued.

John pondered this for a brief moment. “It’ll be done today,” he shrugged. He marked it as done.

In my view, John’s casual use of the word “done” to refer to items that were nowhere near done meant that this whole effort to track tasks was a useless ceremony. But John felt good about it. He could tell Milburn that we were following a two-week sprint, just like an authentic agile team.

It was true we had the accoutrements of an agile team. We used PivotalTracker. We broke down goals into fine-grained tasks. We reviewed the task list once a week, and we added more tasks every two weeks. But the whole thing was mockery of what the Agile Process was supposed to accomplish. If you have programmers who cannot finish assignments, then there is no point in pretending to be making progress.

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