A critique of project management software

A critique of project management software
erock.io

In my opinion, based on my needs on every project I've worked on, I've yet to use a project management software that did anything better than a simple Trello board or the like. At the end of the day, I want a list of tasks, a way to indicate the status on the task, a discussion section for the task, and to be able to close it when I'm finished. That's about 99% of what I need it for. Well, besides the fact that it also should provide insight to management.

My issue with project management software that's more complicated than a set of to-do lists is that they seem to be designed to make you invest in that specific product. They are different enough from each other in terms of layout and workflow that they are unique yet those differences offer no clear value. Depending on which one you use, you have a "task", or a "story", or a "ticket", or an "issue", or something entirely unique if it was written by some clever person for internal PM software.

Then there are concepts like "milestones", "epics", "iterations", and "sprints" (speaking of more concepts I've never needed). You might be "assigned" a task, or perhaps you are the "owner". It's all so tainted by Agile that we have to speak this goofy ass language which makes us feel more sophisticated than the rest of the world which... does the same thing using common verbage.

Worst of all is these tools have barely any meaningful integration with source control hosting like GitHub or GitLab. Yes, they can do nifty things like show the title of the GitHub issue, but every place I've worked for forced me to ping pong between the PM software and GitHub/Lab and I always ended up having to manually sync things between the two. Or I would have to manually copy information between the PM software and whatever non-engineers were using, like Asana.

Like, I really don't care that badly about having to sync some things by hand, but it's a nuisance when the tool pretends to be advanced by shoving a bunch of information, terminology, and processes in my face. Give me a tool that will stay out of my way.

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Oh, yes, the article.

> The thing I really like about this idea is that the user can organize their hierarchy however they like. They are not restricted to what the software defines as an “epic.”

Yep, exactly. It should get out of the way and not force organizations or individuals into hard and fast paradigms. Funny how we overuse abstractions in code but our project management tools are overly concrete.

> Want to create a sprint? Create a circle and reference other circles within it. Want to create an epic? Create a circle and reference other circles within it. Want to view your circle and its children as a kanban? It supports that. Want to move circles around, such as nesting them or unnesting them? It’s as easy as pressing “tab” or “shift+tab.”

Although obviously I'm not a fan of adding more neologisms, the way that circles work here definitely sounds appealing in terms of flexibility. In this case, it kind of makes sense since a circle doesn't necessarily have to represent anything in particular besides what the user wants it to be.

> I want a project management solution that:

> - Emphasizes team collaboration

> - Is able to scale with a company’s growth

> - A playground for teams to experiment and build tasks

> - Ability to capture OKRs (objectives and key results)

> - Task management

Most project management software claims to do most of those things. Not that you aren't right in wanting those things, but the possibilities circles have is the main selling point IMO.

What I liked most about it is that you can combine the same tasks together in multiple places... which helps me since many tasks don't always fit in a single hierarchy. I.e. a circuit board design could be in the "electronics" folder, but also could be part of a specific prototype build.