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Ask HN: Project Management tool for small teams

5 points by point__blank ↗ HN
We are a team of 5devs and looking for a PM tool for our deliverables. Each project has a list of modules and tasks assigned to each developer. At the beginning of project we estimate the man days required for each task and get an ETA for final delivery. This is currently done in Google sheets.

Issues start once the Dev starts, effort increases, there will be delays, people fall sick and don’t work. Now is there a simple tool you suggest where on a daily basis we log work done and pending tasks and the end date automatically gets adjusted? We kind built this also using Google sheets.

I am looking for a better tool than sheets for this.

Thanks

13 comments

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ThePhysicist
Probably this is not a popular opinion but I'd go for Jira. Atlassian offers it for a very low price (10 USD / year I think) for small teams with up to 10 users. You can also self-host it if you do not want to store your data in the cloud, which for me is a large plus. It offers a lot of functionality but doesn't force you to use all of it, and it provides burndown charts and estimation features out of the box (https://www.atlassian.com/agile/tutorials/burndown-charts).

That said you could also use Gitlab, which keeps adding more functionality to their issue management. Trello might be a choice as well as there are plugins / third-party services available that can provide estimates, personally I'd not use it for software development though as I think it's not the right tool for this.

point__blank
I feel Jira’s UI is too complicated for simple project management task.
muzani
I tried Jira with a team of 6 and it was an absolute pain. Nobody wanted to get on it and we ended up just emailing everyone instead. It seems to be designed for a team of 200 or to make managers look good.
ThePhysicist
I hear you, but they recently did a lot of work to simplify their UI and make it less "enterprisey", which I think makes it more usable to smaller teams.

For me Jira is a good compromise since I can easily create custom dashboards, work with Kanban or sprint boards (Trello-style) and see how work is progressing and if we're still on track. In addition we can manage non-software projects with it too, which allows me to use a single tool for all team members and projects. Getting a team to use any kind of formal project management is hard though.

gameface
It might not have everything you want, but just using private github repos, an organisation, and the issues on there would be my preference.

Most developers are already familiar with this too.

dyeje
Pivotal Tracker for me personally. Be warned, it's pretty opinionated, but that's a plus for me because I hate the bikeshedding around these tools.
gshdg
Pivotal is really effective at forcing prioritization, as well as showing impact of changes on delivery if you’re bothering to estimate tasks.

I find its UX a little irritating, but it’s very manageable for teams about that size. Whereas a Jira is probably a bit too much structure at that point, and Trello not nearly enough.

andrei_says_
Pivotal tracker?

We use basecamp but not specifically for dev stuff. It may be combined with toggl for time tracking.

My experience is that trying to have a precise current estimate at all times is a lot of work... do you really absolutely need this?

Basecamp is phenomenal for organizing communication around tasks projects and vision but doesn’t care much about timing although it’s possible to schedule tasks and see them on a calendar.

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muzani
Trello and Asana have the lowest overhead, but they have their limitations. I'd recommend you start with that, then migrate to something better later.

Pivotal works great for something in more detail, if you're breaking down tasks into units of 2 hours or less.

zn44
we've recently moved to https://clubhouse.io from trello. So far it's good, as my colleague described it: it's a jira preconfigured for you.
katelynsk
We use Riter project management tool for our 10devs team. There you can create projects, group of projects, tasks and subtasks. You can also estimate time, track progress, statistics, the latest activity, assign developers to tasks and so on. You can check demo quickly https://demo.riter.co/login.