A critique of project management software • Hacker News Board

Re: A critique of project management software

#71

Post by sjdrc » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 6:09 AM UTC

bobek wrote: post #11

You should fit Phabricator a try (there is a community fork at https://we.phorge.it ). It is fast, simple, yet powerful. Basically the best ticketing system, I've worked so far.

My 2c - my company has been using it for nearly 4 years and while it does some things well, the task management, especially around subtasks and linked tasks is very clunky. Kinda valid criticism for the whole of Phabricator. Everything is markdown which is useful for people proficient with it, but 1. The devs refused to make a monospace font default (a no brainer for markdown!! How else can you sanely create tables?) and 2. Refused to add a WYSIWYG editor which made it very hard to get non technical users to heavily document well (tables again! They’re an amazing way to represent heaps of different types of info on a task, why are they not super easy to use?). This ties in with the rest of the software, in particular wikis which are a huge pain to manage.

I’ve been looking for various software for a while as a potential replacement, and after looking at a variety of open source tools for different parts of our devops process (code hosting, CI, ticketing) I’ve realised that, bigger more well known projects have the best integrations with other tools by far, and also due to their integration between features have the least friction when using day to day.

I’ve lately been looking to GitLab, which looks like it has the middle ground between simplicity of task management, and complexity with a billion features and concepts like Jira. Does anyone who has used it extensively have any experiences to share?

Re: A critique of project management software

#72

Post by whimsica1 » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 9:16 AM UTC

You should check out Linear. Our team momentum and velocity has been great ever since moving to this tool.

It doesn't provide the granular control or extensibility like Jira, but do try to read about their manifesto and how things should work.

What's interesting is your wireframe actually looks a lot like Basecamp, with Sprint options. At one point we were using Basecamp as well, and find Basecamp don't cater to more complicated ticketing and workflow.

Re: A critique of project management software

#73

Post by d4rkp4ttern » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:58 AM UTC

whimsica1 wrote: post #72

You should check out Linear. Our team momentum and velocity has been great ever since moving to this tool. It doesn't provide the granular control or extensibility like Jira, but do try to read about their manifesto and how things should work. What's interesting is your wireframe actually looks a lot like Basecamp, with Sprint options. At one point we were using Basecamp as well, and find Basecamp don't cater to more…

I really like Linear— what I like best about it is that almost every functionality is accessible via keyboard shortcuts. I would go so far as to say that should be a first design principle of any productivity tool, especially one aimed at developers. Kitemaker is similar, I used to use it but switched to Linear

Re: A critique of project management software

#74

Post by SigKill9 » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 1:02 PM UTC

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #73

whimsica1 wrote: post #72

You should check out Linear. Our team momentum and velocity has been great ever since moving to this tool. It doesn't provide the granular control or extensibility like Jira, but do try to read about their manifesto and how things should work. What's interesting is your wireframe actually looks a lot like Basecamp, with Sprint options. At one point we were using Basecamp as well, and find Basecamp don't cater to more…

I really like Linear— what I like best about it is that almost every functionality is accessible via keyboard shortcuts. I would go so far as to say that should be a first design principle of any productivity tool, especially one aimed at developers. Kitemaker is similar, I used to use it but switched to Linear

Thanks for mentioning us (I'm one of the founders of Kitemaker). Totally agree that keyboard shortcuts, a clean design, and simple navigation should be at the core of every productivity tool, which is why we did that as well.

FWIW, we built Kitemaker to tackle some of the points that the original articles highlights, but of course, our solution is a bit different from the authors. Our basic idea was that each work item should be a collaborative workspaces and allow you to track work at the level of deliverables (which basically is what many would say is the correct level, but AFAIK no issue tracker actually supports).

Also, always curious why you switched to Linear :)

Re: A critique of project management software

#75

Post by sdiupIGPWEfh » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #29

loughnane wrote: post #24

Many problems have come from people conflating "task management" with "project management". If you've got a team of people that need a lot of hand-holding, the two can be the same. In most cases though there is a lot of experience on the team. In that case task management too easily becomes micromanaging. What is needed instead is managing against milestones and trusting your team members to execute against it. Some…

Project managers can add a lot of value by zooming out and finding dependencies that would slow things down. The less obvious ones, especially chained ones.

How often do they, in your experience? From my perspective, the only ones discovering and calling out dependencies are senior engineers (or higher) either during planning or during active development, as the PMs are blissfully unaware of how anything's actually connected, even if they've been handed architectural diagrams on a silver platter.

Re: A critique of project management software

#76

Post by ElFitz » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 8:12 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #65

ElFitz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Another of the issues is that it’s picked by people who (supposedly) chose the right tool for them, without considering wether or not it was optimised for those actually doing the tasks. At least that’s how I ended up with boards that absolutely didn’t match my workflow and required me to copy / paste tasks from one board to the other to pass it off to the next step (QA), with QA feedback via Slack. That’s not…

It's possible to misconfigure any tool, that's for sure.

Even more so when those allowed to do the configuring aren’t those that’ll actually have to work with those tools and didn’t bother to ask anyone anything.

Just like when creating software, incidentally.

Re: A critique of project management software

#77

Post by timoth3y » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 12:50 AM UTC

qudat wrote: post #69

timoth3y wrote: post #66

I think the fundamental problem with project management software is poorly defined scope. There are features that involve project and portfolio-level reporting, forecasting, task assignment, feature definition, change-request management, team collaboration, etc. All of these are important, but maybe bundling is not the right answer at this point. I think that's why do much discussion comes down to "feature debate". U…

Thanks for the feedback! > It would be good to rethink what we really want from PM software, specifically, and how to optimize one or two core use cases. I love this line of thinking. What do you really want from PM software?

It's hard to say. There is much more clarity about what makes good reporting software or task management software or spec management software.

I guess good PM software should be more than the sum of its parts. Using a bunch of best-of-breed solutions with no integration is a pain, but that's usually better than well-integrated mediocrity. Although at larger scale, the integration becomes more and more important.

Re: A critique of project management software

#78

Post by roland35 » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 3:54 PM UTC

snovv_crash wrote: post #6

roland35 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Wrike at all? Of all the project management tools I've used I enjoyed Wrike the most. 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.

Wrike has a horrifically slow UI. It's impossible to run a sprint planning on it, or to quickly go through what's in progress during a stand-up. It's actually slower than JIRA, which is impressive.

It's been a few years since I've used it, but that wouldn't surprise me. A lot of these project management tools bloat over time.

Re: A critique of project management software

#79

Post by tablet » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 12:43 PM UTC

qudat wrote: post #2

Author here! Happy to answer any questions about the article or the product idea I'm thinking about building: wormhole. I'll be writing more articles about the product idea to make it more clear what I want to build. Happy to read any feedback or if I'm wasting my time!

Take a look at https://fibery.io, it addresses several problems you listed:

* Rigid and difficult to experiment

* Difficult to scale with a company

* Difficult to couple OKRs (objective and key results) with tasks