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Ask HN: Best project management tool?

3 points by omnivore ↗ HN
Charged with setting up a digital team as part of a large bureaucratic organization and need a project management tool for digital projects. Though there might be a YC preferred tool or alum idea out there that'd work. Any idea?

12 comments

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arisAlexis
Atlassian products are pretty popular and cheap if the team is <10 people. They are a bit slow. If it's more for development I went with Trac for my project, it's pretty minimal and fast.
josephschmoe
Atlassian actually scales very well from my experience, even to 100+ person projects.
mc_hammer
basecamp? trello. plasticscm for files
lifeisstillgood
Might I suggest "Waltzing with bears" by Tom DeMarco. It's about, as he quotes, "Risk Management, or Project Management for Grown-ups".

Overly Bureaucratic cultures got that way for a reason, and it is rarely worth your time trying to beat them looking for the best task tracking software. Play for the next level - managing the risk from the projects.

But I have to suggest that if you are being allowed to choose your own task tracking tools, things are more flexible than might at first seem.

I suggest using fogbugz from Joel Spolsky. It gives simple task tracking, plays well with most other systems, has a decent API so you can script custom output. Atlassian works well too in those respects but fogbugz is just better thought out.

Keep the risk reports as an addendum to whatever reports you need to satisfy the external auditors - eventually you will be seen as first player in the fun new game

omnivore
Thanks! In general, this place is pretty rigid about what they're asking for and it's less about being able to manage my own tasks and more about having some overlord be able to track what we're doing at any one time.

But will totally read that book rec, appreciate it!

lifeisstillgood
So why are they letting you choose the tool - I'm quite surprised there is not a standard if the place is quite rigid.

I would be tempted to ask the person(s) who will be acting as your overlords what they really want. Setting up digital teams is hard enough without having vague expectations and delivering wrong outcomes. If all they really want is a RAG Status for two projects then you need to talk about SLAs and recovery and mitigation options (risk management) not set up and learn another tool.

Do let me know more - really interested to get a feel for what your situation is. Just nosy is all :-)

chadkruse
We've standardized on Github Issues as the PM core, Waffle to prioritize, and Slack to communicate. The tools largely stay out of the way, unlike many of the ones I've used in the past. Give the bureaucrats access to the appropriate rooms on Slack and keep 'em out of everything else.

I've found the right tool is so incredibly team/company specific that third party advice on these matters is often useless, but I'll share a few additional data points in case they help.

1) I recently helped a 40 person dev team rethink their dev tools and they chose to adopt Trello, roughly using this post as a guide: https://community.uservoice.com/blog/trello-google-docs-prod...

The team was using Pivotal and will continue to do so, but adding the Trello layer on top allows the "bureaucratic overlords" the info they need to a) stay informed, and b) make better decisions on resource allocation.

2) If giving the business folks a window into dev progress is important, also check out Sprintly. They do a great job at that.

Good luck!

BKCandace
I use a combination of Trello + Google Drive
lie07
This has been said multiple times here, but Trello.
ASquare
Trello + Google Docs works like a champ