How Project Management tools kill more companies than any other SaaS out there

The problem, as with most enterprise software, is that the desire for a feature often doesn't match reality.

In my experience in services over the past decade and a half, most customers don't use these systems when they're available. They log in a couple of times at the beginning, and then they continue to rely on dealing with a person like a project manager or account manager.

There are a number of reasons for this, such as the customer not wanting to use a system to collaborate, the customer is already too busy with their day-to-day tasks, etc.

I once worked on a multi-million dollar "agile" project that went off the rails until a decision was made to switch to a waterfall approach.

This is not to to say that "waterfall" is good and "agile" is bad.

If your methodology doesn't suit the culture of the people you have delivering the project, you're going to fail no matter what.

The problem is that these pm techniques get adopted organization-wide by executives who became "experts" by reading a few articles and books but don't spend any time becoming experts at the type of people they have working for them.

I feel tools are often an excuse for poor PMs to be lazy. A PM is probably not going to be everyone's best friend -- your job is basically to facilitate decisions by executive leadership and make sure those decisions are executed on. You don't need a fancy tool for that; you need to communicate often with everyone (which often means bugging development managers for reports when they have better things to do.) Tools can help with this -- making the reports easier to generate/consume, but at the end of the day this can be integrated with whatever task assignment process the development group uses internally (be that tickets, or post-it notes, or smoke signals...)

As for agile vs. waterfall, you're right. It's tough to get corporate suits out of the "well when will it be ready?" mindset. The nice thing about agile though is that you repeat the process much more frequently, so you can actually start to improve that process and shorten your sprint times and do more actual work in less time. Executives like to see that, so early in a project it helps to focus on that as long as the product is making progress.

I've seen the flipside of this argument. I worked at a huge multimillion dollar company who didn't have any PM software in place. It was so bad because the project managers were running the asylum. Some had super tight deadlines and needed by 5pm TODAY. Others didn't really care about the tasks, or would forget about them and then throw the developers under the bus. It was insane what was going on, and it was mainly due to not having some kind of software in place that keep track of the tasks and deadlines.

The company wasn't going to go out of business anytime soon, but with all the business they had and more coming every month, how do you expect to have a quality product when your project management is a joke?

I'm working on something a lot like this right now that does all the coordination by e-mail. I would be grateful if you dropped me a line so I can get your feedback when it's up and running. E-mail is in my profile!