Which project management software?

[b0rk]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Project since the last year has gained options for agile planning with Kanban boards and sprints so it’s as simple as project = waterfall.

There is also as part of O365 teams and planner which do a decent Trello inpersonation for small or highly granular projects. Avoiding the tempation to create one big project ^tm is probably a good thing with agile methods anyway.

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Unless your lucky enough to have a customer that doesn’t care about delivery date or cost estimating is core to project management so that you keep focus on time, budget and progress against scope. There will come a point in a project when you’ll need to cut features to stay within time and/or cost or seek additional time / budget to deliver.

From my perspective a PM that can’t advise on how long and how much resource will need be needed to deliver scope isn’t really a PM.

[breamster]

Has anyone mentioned Jira?

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira

[ATG]

andyb28 said:

I think I need to re-educate our customers.

That is indeed the challenge. Many people baulk at it and bury their heads in the sand. This is almost always a mistake. Grasp the nettle.

Midenginecoupe has talked an enormous amount of good sense on this thread. It'll ring true to anyone who has direct experience of a software development project.

Face up to the uncertainty that exists at the start of a project. Don't insist that people must do things that they're demonstratively incapable of doing; e.g. precisely defining requirements, precisely estimating development effort. Make use of the understanding people gain as they execute the project to refine requirements and revise estimates. This is just common sense. What perhaps isn't immediately obvious to the newcomer is that software development projects have a large amount of intrinsic uncertainty and managing that uncertainty is usually the dominant challenge of managing a software development project.

[768]

b0rk said:

Unless your lucky enough to have a customer that doesn’t care about delivery date or cost estimating is core to project management so that you keep focus on time, budget and progress against scope.

And as long as you're lucky enough to have a customer that doesn't care about what were wildly inaccurate estimates against changing scope, it's all good.

[fly]

Thanks for all the advice, very helpful

I have been very far removed from project management decisions during my career, although I'm excited to change that.
I have worked on Agile projects before, but TBH I didn't really understand what it meant from a management point of view... I've started looking into it more now, and understand why it's not compatible with detailed estimates.

I've broken the first project down into specific tasks in Trello. Will go through it all with the team when we begin, pick out the tasks for our first sprint and try to quickly estimate them so something vaguely publishable can be achieved in 3 weeks. Then repeat again for future sprints.

Can someone recommend a simple way of tracking sprint burndown? This is just for my own use and to be able to show management a chart heading in the right direction. Excel is fine if someone has a good method that produces a pretty chart...

[768]

I mentioned Jira near the start of the thread. Never done any time tracking with it, no idea how it is for that. For storing a backlog and splitting out into sprints if scrum's your thing it's fine and obviously integrates with the rest of the Atlassian stack.

Just don't let any project managers find out they can install plugins for it or your productivity will be shot.

[wheelerc]

I tend to use Github for managing smallish software projects and ongoing updates/development. Clients can have access to view progress and even raise issues, you can have Todo lists and milestones, and of course it gives a nice interface to your source code and version control, assuming you are using Git.

[CasioPasio]

For building software, use Taiga boards. Check it out: https://taiga.io/

Then you can use development methods like Scrum.

As a director of a tech company other companies, I speak with also use this. Our project managers recommended the teams to use this. You can easily assign tasks and have sprint meetings with clients ect. Once you get good at it, it will make you super productive.

[AndyTR]

I use a number of tools for general project management and development. None are perfect, but I've learnt to bend them to my needs over the years.

MSP - for waterfall activities where I need to plan in detailed dependencies, for data conversions and the like

Smartsheet - Kanban boards and team task collaboration. The ability to move tasks between people and add in notes, attachments etc. Status reporting is good and it's all online

time-and-space - scheduling resources, time entry and expenses tracking. Reports are good and I can see scheduled v burn. Again, all in the cloud.

Now if I could only have all of this, to the level I need, in one place I'd be really happy. Work front is the goal, but we need to grow as a business before we make the investment.

[Arnold Cunningham]

We use Wrike. I've used Jira, Trac, MS Project, Excel even over the years. Wrike is now firmly my favourite