I've been looking at project management tools for work. I asked on FB what people were using and received multiple recommendations for Trello, a few for Asana and none for Basecamp (which is the one I know best).
I played around with Trello and it's all about cards. My problem is that I want lists, not cards. Haven't used Asana yet. Basecamp seems to be the best fit for my needs (I want to see what has been checked off and create repeatitive processes).
I'm a Basecamp 2 user but have started to migrate over to http://getflow.com which has a nice combination of ordinary lists and cards which you might I want for some specific projects.
I was introduced to HansoftX on an open source project I was contributing to and 10/10 would use it again.
It was deceptively simple to get started but really powerful once I was able to dig in a bit more. Super responsive drag-drop UI and apparently it uses Meteor as the back-end so change updates are instantaneous.
It uses both lists (that can be nested multiple layers deep) and cards. You can drag tasks from lists to cards, or from cards to lists with links between the two being maintained. We were using the cards to track ToDo/Working/Done and lists to plan releases and track suggestions.
The project seems really young but they're doing all the 'right things'. One of the project contributors set it up to trigger notification updates in Slack when the boards changed and apparently it even has GitHub integration now.
I'm in no way affiliated with HansoftX. I just think it's a pretty amazing tool.
I gave up on Asana when it started retooling to focus more exclusively on Agile/Scrum stuff. No tool should be allowed to claim to be about improving productivity if it also goes out of its way to support constructs taken from Agile/Scrum.
Can't recommend ToDoist for one reason - there is no straightforward way to duplicate sets of tasks. You can't copy and paste. Not in the iOS app, not in the web app, not in the Mac app. ToDoist is super inflexible and For that reason I had to bail.
I've tried using many different online tools for tracking software projects and work (including Todoist, Trello et al) and eventually settled on Asana.
It's not perfect, but it most closely matches the workflow I need. It's flexible without being overly generic (Trello) yet doesn't impose or constrain your workflow too much as some other tools do.
There certainly are some quirks though, and my biggest peeve is the 'empty task' problem described in the original article. If I could vote for one fix, it would be that!
I have some similar frustrations with Asana. The UX leaves a fair bit to be desired, especially when it comes to organizing bigger stuff into projects, subtasks, and so on. The android app isn't very great.
That said, we use Asana at my (30 employee) org. We have teams, lots of projects, and I've wired their projects into our own intranet stuff and email lists using api integrations. We use tags and projects, have github wired in (commit messages that reference an asana task show up in Asana under that taks), and a nice little Slack integration.
Thing is, if you want the ability to have lots of bigger structures, shared across multiple teams, there is likely to be a hefty startup cost - it isn't a simple thing to do. We previewed a lot of different project management tools, and Asana struck a nice balance between powerful enough and useful out of the box. We end up doing our own onboarding and norming with new employees, but it's worth it ultimately.
I'd love to see examples of other software at a similar price point that has project, subtask, team, comment-thread, and tag features with Asana levels of api integrations available.
I think that a major driving force behind how slowness of asana is how their API is formatted. In order to load up the my tasks section you need a minimum of 2 requests per 100 tasks that exist in your workspace. And if they don't bump the request limit to 100 then they need 2 requests every 25 tasks.
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I played around with Trello and it's all about cards. My problem is that I want lists, not cards. Haven't used Asana yet. Basecamp seems to be the best fit for my needs (I want to see what has been checked off and create repeatitive processes).
It was deceptively simple to get started but really powerful once I was able to dig in a bit more. Super responsive drag-drop UI and apparently it uses Meteor as the back-end so change updates are instantaneous.
It uses both lists (that can be nested multiple layers deep) and cards. You can drag tasks from lists to cards, or from cards to lists with links between the two being maintained. We were using the cards to track ToDo/Working/Done and lists to plan releases and track suggestions.
The project seems really young but they're doing all the 'right things'. One of the project contributors set it up to trigger notification updates in Slack when the boards changed and apparently it even has GitHub integration now.
I'm in no way affiliated with HansoftX. I just think it's a pretty amazing tool.
Then, in a ~10people Team we (after lonog debate) used Asana, and after the first days, nobody was using it, because it was horrible.
I can't really put my finger on it. It somehow feels like a Prototype after checking off long feature checklists.
It's not perfect, but it most closely matches the workflow I need. It's flexible without being overly generic (Trello) yet doesn't impose or constrain your workflow too much as some other tools do.
There certainly are some quirks though, and my biggest peeve is the 'empty task' problem described in the original article. If I could vote for one fix, it would be that!
That said, we use Asana at my (30 employee) org. We have teams, lots of projects, and I've wired their projects into our own intranet stuff and email lists using api integrations. We use tags and projects, have github wired in (commit messages that reference an asana task show up in Asana under that taks), and a nice little Slack integration.
Thing is, if you want the ability to have lots of bigger structures, shared across multiple teams, there is likely to be a hefty startup cost - it isn't a simple thing to do. We previewed a lot of different project management tools, and Asana struck a nice balance between powerful enough and useful out of the box. We end up doing our own onboarding and norming with new employees, but it's worth it ultimately.
I'd love to see examples of other software at a similar price point that has project, subtask, team, comment-thread, and tag features with Asana levels of api integrations available.