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Ask HN: Open-source project management for non-software projects?

9 points by gwbrooks ↗ HN
My small, tech-savvy-but-not-tech team needs a project management system -- projects/tasks/kanban, maybe a wiki. But open-source solutions with good UI/UX seem to be, almost inevitably, designed around software projects and I know from past experience something clunky won't get used regularly.

I've looked at YouTrack, Gitlab, Taiga and others -- all fantastic, if only I could sufficiently hide some of the dev-specific functionality. Should I just give up and get a ClickUp or Jira subscription? Or have you found a self-hosted option for non-software project management?

10 comments

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_ink_
OpenProject comes to mind. It has a community edition, which comes with annoying limitations, though.
msantos
+1 for OpenProject.

For small (sub 20 users) their hosted plan comes up to approx EUR1400 (total) per year. And IMO that's definitely worth paying for, instead of going down the self-hosting path once you considered the costs of self-hosting it i.e. (maintainer's hourly rate * 2 * 12) + hardware hosting costs.

https://www.openproject.org/intro/

gwbrooks
Yep -- love the software, but the lack of a kanban-style board in the free edition means we'd jump to their paid plan. Not a deal killer (the plan is $435/yr at our small size), but a sense of pig-headedness has me looking at other options.
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taubek
I've used YouTrack. As far as I know you can customize your workflow a lot. We have used it for different types of project, from content creation and marketing to software development.
gwbrooks
Ooooh -- you named off two of my use cases. Can you talk a bit more about how you're using it for content creation and marketing?
taubek
Sure. I'll write more about it tomorrow in the morning. It is to long to write it on my mobile :)
taubek
We had a lot to teams in the company. Some of there were:

- developers

- writers

- designers

Each team had a separate project in YouTrack. Each task was a ticket. Let's say that we have finished a new version of software and we need a blog post announcement with video.

We would keep an eye on development ticket (DT-1).

We would create a parent ticket for content (CCT-1) that the release and would set it to depend on the development ticket DT-1.

We would also create child content tickets (CCT-2, CCT-3, CCT-4, etc.): one would be for blog post text, another fone for featured image, next one for social media images, etc.

We would also create a main ticket for announcement video (VPROD-1). It would have a subticket for creating a script (VPROD-2), record audio (VPROD-3), create screencast (VPROD-4), produce final video and upload it to YouTube (VPROD-5).

This allowed us to assign each task to different person: designer would get tickets for create images (CCT-1, CCT-3), writer would get tickets for text (CCT-2 and VPROD-2), narator would get VPROD-3, and video editor wound get VPROD-4 and VPROD-5.

Once the all content subtickets were completed (CCT2-CCT4) you would see that you have you have all subtickets/tasks done that you need to complete CCT-1.

Then you would just need to wait for development to release final version of software. We would know that they are done when DT-1 would change the state to "Completed". At that moment we would publish all of the content that was needed for that release: CCT-1 and all subtickets.

Same principle was applied to marketing tasks.

Take a look at https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/features. We have used Agile boards a lot (to keep track at which stage is some part of the project) and Customization to create custom flow.