Ask HN: How do you deal with so many project management systems?
I deal with a lot of clients, many of them have their own internal systems and teams, and they add me in to their projects.
I've noticed that now my life consists of having multiple Basecamp, Trello and Asana projects all open in different tabs at the same time. Then they want me chatting in Skype, or they text and email. And I have to remote with Join.me, Zoho, GotoMeeting.
No longer are project management systems keeping me organized, it's turned into a mess.
Do you deal with this too? Are there any solutions out there that can interface with all these major systems at once?
53 comments
[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadInstead, treat them as deliverables and manage your own organization elsewhere.
You can't do that, and it's not because they're all using separate systems. It just doesn't scale. (Insert long discussion here about multi-tasking, competing business interests, cost-of-delay, and so on)
One of the main reasons why consultants who get paid so much $$ is because they are so flexible. Yes, they can program in many languages, but they also know multiple operating systems, PM systems, and have the ability to communicate across multiple channels. The real $$ comes when you can do it all in English, Chinese and Spanish :)
In a way, ticket systems are another type of documentation, along with man pages and KB articles and persistent chat (like Slack).
EDIT 2: Updated the wrong comment.
It's not elegant but it means that I can use the tools that are the most relevant and ignore everything else in the meantime.
Haven't found the best way to consolidate applications for real time services. Although, I've found that it hasn't been too difficult to get people to hop on the Slack train. I've been in the same problem with video chat - Google Hangouts, Facetime, GoToMeeting, Skype, etc. Would love to hear what other people use.
[1]: https://sameroom.io
It'd definitely be nice to replace our internal system with something that was lighter-weight than JIRA and had integrations (bidirectionally) with the customer-facing task tracking systems. I'll run this by the team and we may give it a try.
One question: I don't see pricing or a paid version anywhere on the site. What's the business model for this product?
Response on pricing above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565896
There's nothing on the homepage, no pricing page, nothing. It makes me nervous to sign up without this information.
I went looking... it's not on the site, not in the knowledge base, not on the blog.
There is absolutely no pricing information.
Does Taco not charge anyone? If you do charge, give me a ballpark, a range even... it doesn't matter so long as you give it.
Am I signing up for something without that info? Er... no.
Turn this upside down now, think about 100 users paying $50 a month for something they depend on, I bill $100/hr, if you can save me an hour a month I'm winning, once you have $5000 a month every month think about the next 100, keep going, sounds like your product has a use, don't make the free mistake, it's been highlighted here many times, good luck!
If you're going to have a free tier, I'd say limit it to N service integrations (3-5), but definitely make your core users paying close to the start.
If I had a need for something like this day to day, I'd definitely pay... Actually, I'd suffer for a while, then try it, then suffer again, then pay... but that's me and I'm kind of cheap/frugal. Most people will start paying once they see and feel the value.
Also, it's much easier to field requests from a few hundred paying users than thousands of non-paying ones. It's very hard to do conversion from free after the fact... many businesses have failed, burned, burned out, and left their best (paying) users in a lurch following this model.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldhHkVjLe7A
Main rule: avoid anything synchronous as much as possible such a chat, Slack, group chat, Skype, just turn that shit off; if someone wants to catch you he will call you on the phone
You need some project management tool for progress tracking and for enabling good specs, but only one; so get either Trello or Asana but not both; though can have have both for different dept.s and task types
(Might be worth adding that all the companies I have worked at for the last few years were under resourced).
My hunch suggests that there will be soon a Project Management tool that has growth trajectory similar to "Slack" or who knows it might be "Slack" itself.
Second thought was, "why don't you pay your staff to enter time from my invoices?"
Third thought was "I'll have to bill you a stupid hourly rate to enter my time in your system."
Right now I'm stuck at the third thought and they've agreed, but I haven't started doing it yet and don't want to. Their systems are their systems and mine are mine.
You are also correct that we want to optimize everything. Sigh.
If the output would be the same whether it was done by you or someone else... well, why not explore not doing it yourself?
+customer data folder ++customer name > links to trello,slack go here +++project name > links to trello etc. go here
then I have a todo.md or todo.txt using imdone-atom with snippits, gives you a text based kanban, you can open project folders with atom --add c:\customers\abc\project1 and alt-t for tasks
also alt-j is journal where you can try to kanban all customers if you're ocd
documentation should not go in a ticket system, it should go in a wiki
my fav is a combo of integrated apps like trello/slack, jira/confluence, github/gitter
tasks are todo/doing/done and done includes closing their ticket system and updating their wiki or whatever they're using like a wiki
The mental model I follow is:
1 - Figure out if you can fight it. If it's a fight you can win, push to standardize. If it's one you can't, don't waste your time.
2 - If you don't fight it, figure out which have data that is really being used, and which people are just going through the motions. For the data that's being used, keep it current and think through the input. For data that's not, don't kill yourself.
3 - Always have your own #s so that you can answer what's really going on.
I find that it's really nice to be able to handle texts while I'm working directly on my computer, or wherever I am. Does phone calls as well, if you're using a headset with a mic. Hangouts also does video calls and screen sharing, but nobody else seems to use it much. I actually like it a lot, even though the video quality leaves a lot to be desired.
Edit: been a happy user since it was Grand Central, before the Google buyout.
2. Use Browser Profiles, and have a differently named user for each client, with different default tabs and authentication states. When you need to work on "Client A", simply click your name in the top-right of Chrome, select "Client A", and a new window will open with all of your important tabs open.
3. Documentation isn't just for code! For each client, keep a dossier of your contacts at the organization, their preferred method of contact, etc. This document can also act as "usage notes" for their internal or provided systems. It's helpful to have a document like this be the default opened tab when hopping into the Browser Profile for a specific client.
In go tasks, troubleshooting attempts, outcomes, links, etc. Then I copy+paste into github issues, commit messages, and wiki articles as needed (part of my deliverables, as @LeifCarrotson puts it).
* No vendor lock-in, no lag, no migration issues.
* Never have duplicate typing because of copy+paste.
* Get a daily history of your work going back into time in a light, portable, ubiquitous format.
* Recover from accidentally hitting the back button while writing a Jira ticket.
* Be able to precisely answer "What did you work on last week" (or last Monday when you logged out of VPN, or anything else)
I have to move the text from my file into the tracking tool(s), and that could be a downside. But I like having a layer of translation there. It lets me select and rephrase snippets that will communicate best in each environment.
Example: https://gist.github.com/SimplGy/a516c54a81fb24f807f9512fed82...
So, we developed a robo-advisor to deal with it called stratejos (http://stratejos.com). stratejos takes care of house keeping (like making sure the tools are being used as expected) and provides project analytics on top of this. We're currently in beta, would love to hear the problems people are having so we can solve them.
With the skype/chatting/etc this is probably something you just have to deal with, as someone else said, its part of being a consultant.