
Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with? - softwareman
I know there are tons and tons of PM apps. I wanna know if any of those drive your daily project management activities as (Engineering) Manager.
======
TrevorAustin
As an engineering manager, what I want most from a project management app is
something that does a good job helping engineers on my teams collaborate
effectively with non-technical departments. We use Asana for this right now
and it works well, and at a previous employer we used Jira which also worked
well. Done well, it means the team always has shared state about what the
latest designs are, how far along various pieces of work are, and what to-dos
we need to keep track of. The goal is to offload onto the tool a bunch of
status communication that otherwise happens in meetings.

If someone was starting from no system today I’d recommend Asana. Jira gives
you way too much rope to make a custom workflow to enforce business rules, but
as long as you have a light touch and use it mostly stock it’s fine. I have
trouble organizing medium to large projects with many small sub-tasks in
Trello. When I’ve used a more engineering-focused tool like GitHub Issues or
Phabricator, I have too much trouble getting non-technical stakeholders to
follow along there. I despised PivotalTracker trying to put me in a process
straightjacket, and found BugZilla unusably ugly.

~~~
jaryd
Second Asana. I've been using it for years and it has really improved
tremendously over that time. There are definitely still many things missing
(most notably for me is the lack of advanced markup in
comments/conversations)... but it works very well for cross-functional
collaboration and longer-term project management.

~~~
Benjamin_Dobell
I've just started using Asana in the last month, the very first thing I
noticed was how incredibly slow the interface is to respond. Dragging things
around on a board is particularly painful compared to Trello or Github
Projects.

I also find it incredibly annoying that when you add a card to a column, it
adds it to the top of the column, rather than the bottom.

However, aside from those two annoyances, it does seems to offer a _lot_ of
useful functionality.

------
gravypod
The team I'm on currently uses JIRA but I would harshly recommend against
using it. It's one of the tools on the belt of the Agile Clergy that is used
to beat the peasant into submission.

The tool is expensive, constantly deteriorating in visual appeal, workflow,
and support, and over complicates very simple tasks. The Agile Clergymen who
work at my office boast it's integration abilities, it's high customization,
and 3 charts it produces that inevitably say "You're not Agile enough" as
being all one would ever need for a project management system.

In my opinion there are three main options right now.

If you're hosting an internal Software Development-only ticketing system that
only the PM and the developers will interact with, and you are using GitLab,
and you have the ability to host a robust GitLab server internally, I would
recommend GitLab Issues [0]. It's free and open source and very integrated
with the entire workflow even including time-tracking, gantt charts, etc. It's
all bundled into what they're calling a Portfolio Manager [1] that has a bunch
of other features you may want to explore as a PM.

If you want to use JIRA because the Agile mob is present within your
organization it is a fine option so long as you either don't mind spending a
very long time figuring out how the unnatural interface works and setting up a
bunch of essentially needed "customization" then you can look into that. It
even produces 3 pretty nice charts!

If you specifically need to take in issues and triage bug reports and feature
requests then you may want to look into Redmine [2] or BugZilla [3]. Both are
extremely dated but have been tried and successfully used by many large teams.

[0] -
[https://about.gitlab.com/features/issueboard/](https://about.gitlab.com/features/issueboard/)

[1] - [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ee/issues/3254](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/3254)

[2] - [https://www.redmine.org/](https://www.redmine.org/)

[3] - [https://www.bugzilla.org/](https://www.bugzilla.org/)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I've been an Agile Tech Coach for ten years now and I actively recommend
_against_ JIRA -- or any other online tool for that matter.

Whatever you want from your tool, the goal is to keep it as simple as possible
so you can actually work. If you've got your head stuck in an online system
for any length of time during the day, you're not doing it right.

Tools, whether PM tools or not, are supposed to disappear so you can focus on
value. If you're talking about them, spending time in them, going to useless
meetings with pointless reports generated from them, etc? They stop being
tools. At that point they become obstacles. Carpenters don't go to meetings
with graphs of how many hammers they own. Brick masons don't spend half a day
comparing the status of all of their trowels. Project Management has jack
squat to do with configuring and using PM tools. Unless you're specifically
training on skills, tools should _disappear_. That's the entire point. I wish
more people knew that.

ADD: Do you know the people who _do_ focus on tools and talk about them a lot?
People who don't know what they're doing. To them, the feature list of any
tool is reassurance that they can continue not knowing what they're doing and
somehow things will still work out fine. The tool will handle it.

~~~
gravypod
> Whatever you want from your tool, the goal is to keep it as simple as
> possible so you can actually work.

> ADD: Do you know the people who do focus on tools and talk about them a lot?
> People who don't know what they're doing.

This to me proves you're not in the bubble of people who I talk about when I
say "Agile Clergy".

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I find the worst people to deal with are those who have already tried Agile
and love it -- without all the experience that a few dozen teams gives you. To
them, as you point out, it's much more of a religious thing.

I remember my first coaching gig. I was looking to dive into a team, get into
the code, make things happen! Instead, I spent the first day in what could
best be called religious discussions. It was quite odd.

But in their defense, they had no context. Agile was an abstract and nebulous
thing. Instead they all had heroes/demigods that they looked to for advice
from on-high. The focus was on "being correct"; tool features, usage, and
adoption; having a good time with the teams. All sorts of crap instead of just
making stuff people want.

I see the same thing in management, with or without the Agile part added in.
Once you get removed from value delivery, even if it's only just a little bit,
you end up adrift at sea. So many of the management schools are just as
religious as the Agile folks. They just have different demigods :)

------
shivekkhurana
My current company uses Clubhouse.
([https://clubhouse.io/](https://clubhouse.io/))

Clubhouse is Trello where each card can is synced with a git branch. As you
add and push, the cards move automatically.

This helps me as a developer, because the business is always up to date with
the latest progress and all I need to do is follow the company's git workflow.

To see the cards move when you raise or merge a PR is magical.

There are other features like collecting tickets together into an epic, sub
projects and integrations with logging and deployment tools. If you are the
manager and you implement this in your org, you dev team will love you.

~~~
allworknoplay
I second clubhouse. it's very easy to work with, not as loose as trello, not
as heavy as jira. excellent integrations. it's a little young, but really a
very good balance.

------
muzani
Used many of them. None really worked well.

As a PM, my main focus is just to get people to update what they're doing and
trying to assign, distribute, negotiate, and see tasks and dependencies that
need to be done.

Asana - Amazingly good in the first few versions. But it started getting slow
as they added more features. Back then I would use it even for trivial things
like bug tracking, because the keys and controls were so intuitive.

Google Docs/Sheets - It does the job. It's got history and versioning. Low
learning curve. It's very powerful at searching (you can link to a document
and it will search the linked document as well). Sheets is mildly
programmable.

It's missing some tricks like tagging people and tracking who is assigned to
what, attaching files, and has a limited comment system. You can't really
subtask, map dependencies, or do burndown charts with it.

Jira - Hated it. Its core purpose seems to be covering asses. It makes a PM
look extremely productive. It makes late night and remote workers look
productive. It logs what people are doing and logs issues and dependencies.
Extremely useful for people who have agile contracts for another company. But
actually managing people seems to be the lowest priority of the tool.

Pivotal Tracker - Lots of potential. If you're using full Agile, this is
probably the best. It's probably too heavy if you have a team of two, but even
then it works. I think the Epics handling is a little messy, but it's much
better than the others.

Trello - good for assigning tasks to a group. Too light for managing a
pipeline from design to dev to testing to approval. At some point, it acts
like email, where people get too many messages and ignore a lot of them.

I'm considering experimenting more with Google Sheets and maybe even group
Evernotes. The others are a bit too clumsy.

~~~
fermienrico
Have you tried using Github repo? Kanban dashboard is excellent and you can
use the milestone feature to add timebound projects.

------
mxwsn
Notion has been wonderful for me as a personal project management app. My main
use cases are organizing and juggling personal to-dos across several
independent projects and growing knowledge bases for each project organically
as I add complexity to computational pipelines and record experimental results
(I'm doing a PhD). I switched from Evernote which to me was significantly
weaker in linking individual notes into larger structures.

[0] [https://www.notion.so](https://www.notion.so)

------
cagenut
The only system i've ever been able to tolerate is a 2-page google doc.

    
    
      - shared but read-only, the manager writes
      - at the top of page1 are your top3 quarterly goals
      - each persons name starts a short outline list of their 2 -3 active task-goals
      - since your team is 3 - 8ish ppl everyone fits on one page
      - all other ideas, wants, tasks, goals, questions, etc go onto page 2, "the wishlist"
      - meet twice a week, mon/thur
      - monday you go around the "room" (its always a vid conf) and each person declares their 2 - 3 items
      - thursday you go around the room and go over what got done and/or learned
      - every quarter you start a new doc with a clean/only-a-few-carryovers wishlist

------
TheAceOfHearts
Not a manager, just an engineer.

I was happiest when my team could just get by with GitHub issues. It was super
simple and really easy to work with.

Eventually we used JIRA and Confluence, and it worked fine. Just make sure you
keep workflows as simple as possible. I think there exists the temptation to
add lots of constraints and requirements when creating and resolving issues,
but that just raises the bar for getting actual things done. If reporting
something takes more time than actually fixing the bug then your system is
broken.

~~~
aerojoe23
"Raises the bar" is usually seen as a positive phase. Meaning you have to be
as good as the bar to do something. I think it's more clear to say it "raises
artificial hurdles that take away from focusing on quality."

------
DanielBMarkham
Notepad. Or any other code editor.

I wrote a book on extreme minimalist information management[1]. Notepad and
git (along with the appropriate text tools, which might just be some shell
programming) work just fine, as long as you know how to tag and organize
stuff.

Even without the stuff I wrote about, what do you really need to know? 1) What
work is there? 2) How much of it is done? 3) Who's doing what? 4) How are
things going?

There's not a lot to it -- which is probably why you see fourteen million PM
apps out in the wild.

I'd like to see PM apps make the transition that source control apps did to
git. That is, moving from everybody-makes-an-app-they-sell-you to something
bland, easy, free, highly configurable and interoperable -- and runs anywhere.
There's no reason we can't have that.

1: [https://leanpub.com/info-ops](https://leanpub.com/info-ops)

~~~
regularfry
You seem to have missed the blatant self-promotion opportunity here. Link?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Fixed it.

For anyone interested. I also have a free white paper specifically about PM
information management. Ping me.

------
willart4food
This is the system that I have developed through the years, it's simple, kind
of low-tech, but it works:

\- Meeting starts every Monday night, 5PM/end of business day \- Meeting ends
when it ends. Usually 1-2 hours, but at times till midnight \- Only
executives, one per department: so CEO, COO, CFO, SW Development,
Marketing/Sales... no more than 5 max 7 people \- A google spreadheet \-
Projects are ranked by importance: 1,2,3 and 4. 1 High, 2 medium, 3. low. 4
just placeholder for ideas \- Projects must have a completion date of 3 months
or less. If longer they get broken down into <3 months chunks \- Weekly
deliverables. All deliverables are due on Monday \- Each row is 1 project,
then there are columns for Dependencies, Resources (people, money, things,
outside contractors) \- If one of the deliverables is going to be late, or
there's a chance it might be late, the executive has to notify the executive
committee by email no later than end of business day on Thursday with a
succinct explanation of what's going on and revised project deliverable
etc.... The CEO is in charge of eventually clarify with the Executive or take
any action. If no such email arrives, the deliverable is assumed to be on-
time, on-target, and on-budget by the following Monday. \- Only the Executive
is accountable. No blaming others.

The above was the original, these days I like to ADD to the above BASECAMP
project management for any and all communications between anyone involved.
Everything's public, from commitments to comments, if it's not in there, it
didn't happen.

~~~
dual_basis
Imagining myself as one of the executives in this meeting, this all sounds
absolutely awful, and I would be looking to leave as soon as possible.

------
alanfranzoni
You didn't tell us what would you like to do with it. What is your problem?
What kind of projects and team sizes are you working with?

Do you need an application, at all?

I would suggest you to devise a WORKFLOW that you like, and you build or
choose a (probably small) app that fits your needs.

Personally, I rarely found PM problems (reporting, calculating effort spent vs
remaining, record task completion) that require a lot more than a spreadsheet,
but again, I don't know what you're trying to achieve.

------
egeozcan
We eat our own dog food. We have a fairly complex piece of software called
L-mobile PM (the marketing material for it exists only in German, sorry:
[https://www.l-mobile.com/geschaeftsfelder/vernetztes-
projekt...](https://www.l-mobile.com/geschaeftsfelder/vernetztes-
projektmanagement/projektmanagement/projektkontrolle/))

The great thing about having our own tool (which we also license to our
customers but it's far from our main focus) is the possibility to adapt
exactly to how our company works. It is integrated into everything
(integration and offline are our strengths) and when something doesn't fit, it
usually takes a few days until a solution is found (or it is already
implemented for a customer). It even has a lunch module which adds calendar
entries in our outlook when we say we are attending a company lunch, and that
is integrated into navision which takes care of the accounting side.

We also evaluated using JIRA at one point in the history. IMHO, if JIRA fits,
go and use it, when not, you can bend it but that causes some headaches.

~~~
blattimwind
> www.l-mobile.com

Your company's website is simply atrocious. It takes many seconds to load on
my 100 MBit/s connection, the CPU fan immediately spins up, scrolling lags,
opening the navigation / burger menu takes several seconds, further navigation
again takes several seconds before anything but a spinner shows up.

Suppose I'm a prospective customer. If I saw your website, you're going to
have a hard time to sell me your (presumably) web-based software, since I must
conclude that it must be as slow and bloated (or worse, since it should have
more functionality than delivering a static page) than your company website.

~~~
egeozcan
It's done by the marketing team (probably a paid theme - I'm not sure). Our
web-based software is developed by completely other teams. I agree that the
web site needs work, they probably need help.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll pass it forward.

------
johnorourke
People have asssumed you're asking "what PM app do you recommend" but you're
not - you're asking if engineering managers use one to drive daily activity.
Good question :)

Every business works differently, so all PM apps in their default config will
match 80% of what you need, for 80% of businesses.

If a manager implements an app without customising it to the business, users
will be frustrated, directionless and end up hating the app - see user
comments in this thread!

Bespoking it to the business allows users to do their jobs with minimal
interaction AND WITHOUT MICROMANAGEMENT.

Finally, without management buy-in (that's you!), without you actually using
the inputs and outputs of it, it will fail - lead by example.

Hope this helps :)

------
shawndimantha
For agile story tracking and development pipeline management, Pivotal Tracker.
Lots of great features for team productivity and health tracking, also helps
as you automate your workflow. For general tasks and individual workflow,
Trello. By far my favorite UI and delightful experience in using for simple
workflow management using a kanban style (which plays a large role when you
use it regularly). Trello is less useful the more team members that join and
the more complex the workflow you need to manage.

------
dragonsh
Two apps drive it for us which are self hosted on Google cloud 1. kallithea-
scm ([https://kallithea-scm.org/](https://kallithea-scm.org/)) generating
analysis of code commits, with webhooks to 2. Taiga
([https://taiga.io](https://taiga.io)) for project and issue management which
we use for kanban boards, sprint planning and review and issues management.
They do drive our engineering team on daily basis.

------
valeg
[https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/](https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/)

Give it some love.

~~~
fermienrico

      Phacility
      Phabricator
    

This is such an egregious name for a company and the product.

------
oneplane
Pretty much just JIRA and communication/storage apps on the side (like Slack
and Google Docs). A lot of people seem to hate JIRA, but as long as you keep
it simple and only keep some border requirements rigid, it's pretty sweet to
work with.

Other setups I've worked with are Trello-style (but not actual Trello) kanban
boards, be it a physical board or a board implemented in something else. In
some projects it worked very well with GitLab and GitHub integrated project
tools. As limited as they are, they are a great minimal way to workflow your
stuff. Anything more complex than that is often in the wrong place and should
most likely be managed at a different (non-engineering) level. Perhaps that is
why JIRA works for us as well on most projects; we tend to not mix engineering
and non-engineering stuff as they often have different needs where even small
differences make for a bad combination in the same tool.

------
Gorath
Emacs + org-mode has always served me well.

------
osrec
We tried a bunch of PM apps in my company, but couldn't find ones that did
time tracking and invoicing well. We just needed something simple - an app
that would let us list our project tasks and tick them off as they were
completed. Eventually we built our own for internal use. Some of our clients
saw us using it and asked us to wrap it into a service - so we created
[https://usebx.com](https://usebx.com) \- we still use it internally, and it's
serving us well (we're a team of 25).

------
TXV
I have recently discovered Backlog - disclaimer: due to being hired by the
company, even if not in that team. If you google "backlog project management"
it should be the first result.

I honestly like it very much. It is way easier to use than Jira, nice modern
UI/UX, integrates with git etc. It has enough features to help with larger
projects, and you can shut off features you don't need. There's even more to
say, but I don't want to spam the thread.

I feel the product deserves credit. You can try it out.

------
aantix
Pivotal Tracker.

One backlog. It forces everyone to truly think about priorities and by its
design, avoids the “everything is important, mark it a P5!” issue.

~~~
steve_adams_86
I really, really miss pivotal. I have to use JIRA these days. The access to
information, speed, clarity, and simplicity of pivotal makes JIRA feel
borderline masochistic.

That's also the fault of my process-obsessed co-workers who, in my opinion,
often prize how we do work over actually doing work. Our workflows are
hilariously over engineered. Even so, pivotal is great. I'd choose it again in
a heartbeat.

------
todd3834
I’ve always found Trello to be just enough for my needs.
[https://trello.com/](https://trello.com/)

I know Jira and Confluence get a lot of hate but the companies I’ve worked for
always seem to favor it and I’ve gotten very comfortable in there now. If I
were at a company with <20 people then I’d go with Trello. >20 then Jira

------
nradov
CA Agile Central (Rally) works quite well if you need to manage a portfolio of
many long-term programs and teams. It lets you coordinate roadmaps, balance
workloads, and plan at varying levels of abstraction. But it's probably
overkill for small organizations, and requires some training and customization
to use effectively.

------
allanmacgregor
I been using Monday.com rather successfully for that past couple months, I'm
using to track project work, sprints, bug queues all the way to using it for
tracking my own morning routine.

While it doesn't have all the bells and whistles or even the integrations as
Jira or Asana, I've found it more useful.

------
melolife
My experience has been that the most important consideration in a project
management tool is simplicity and ease of use, which is why I find Github's
issue tracking with threads + tags + milestones to be the gold standard. If
you need private hosting you can use GitLab/Gogs/Gitea.

------
lkrubner
After many years trying a vast variety of project management software, I've
come to the conclusion that what matters most is the project manager, rather
than the software. Nowadays when I consult with clients I advise them: "First,
find a really good project manager, and then use whatever software they want
to use." If you have a great project manager, and they prefer to keep track of
everything on crumpled up napkins, then the whole team should be given an
ample supply of crumpled up napkins. Great project managers are rare, but if
you have a great one, you should let them set the parameters of project
management for your project.

When you have a bad project manager, good software will not save you. This is
my personal story of how things can go wrong:

\-----------------------------------

At 2 PM we had a meeting scheduled to go over all of the tasks in
PivotalTracker. John had promised Milburn that we would execute our work
according to a project-management philosophy that the tech industry called
agile. Agile software development, among many other aspects, focuses on the
delivery of small, incremental improvements to software. It encourages self-
organizing teams, evolving and continuous progress, and rapid response to
challenges faced. The Celolot team would work two-week sprints, checking in at
the end of each period to see where everyone was at.

Unfortunately, vague definitions of “done” haunted our progress. John read
through a long list of tasks that had been assigned to Sital.

“Find all possible variations of ‘Close Date,’” John read from the screen. “Is
this done?”

“Yeah,” muttered Sital. “Sure.”

His assurance meant nothing to me. Sital would never lie, indeed I was often
surprised by his childlike honesty, but he lacked an appreciation for the many
ways that software could break.

“How many variations have been tested?” I asked.

“Two,” replied Sital.

“That’s not enough,” I said.

“That’s enough,” countered John. “‘Close Date’ and ‘Contract.’ That’s all we
need.”

“What about ‘Close’?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” John thought aloud. “What about ‘Close’?”

“I’ll see,” Sital responded somewhat robotically.

John marked it as done.

“Wait,” I objected. “That is not done.”

John turned back to Sital. “Do you think you can finish today?”

“Absolutely,” Sital assured us.

“Then I’ll mark it as done,” said John, returning to his screen.

“But it’s not done till it’s done,” I argued.

John pondered this for a brief moment. “It’ll be done today,” he shrugged. He
marked it as done.

In my view, John’s casual use of the word “done” to refer to items that were
nowhere near done meant that this whole effort to track tasks was a useless
ceremony. But John felt good about it. He could tell Milburn that we were
following a two-week sprint, just like an authentic agile team.

It was true we had the accoutrements of an agile team. We used PivotalTracker.
We broke down goals into fine-grained tasks. We reviewed the task list once a
week, and we added more tasks every two weeks. But the whole thing was mockery
of what the Agile Process was supposed to accomplish. If you have programmers
who cannot finish assignments, then there is no point in pretending to be
making progress.

\----------------------

related to here:

[https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-
Steps/dp/09...](https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-
Steps/dp/0998997617/)

------
imirzadeh
Phabricator!

It’s an open source software development platform can do pretty much ANYTHING
you want and if you know PHP, you can add everything you need at low cost! It
has task management, code repository, code review, team collaboration syatem,
knowledge sharing and ...

------
tootie
I don't care what anyone else says, I always come back to JIRA. The basic
usage is simple enough. Everything is customizable although you can shoot
yourself in the foot if you overthink it. It's great at associating tickets in
various relationships. It integrates very neatly with version control and CI
systems. Anytime we try something simpler, we hit a wall and end up back with
JIRA.

~~~
unixhero
Yeah. And frankly I love making filters with jql. It really works.

------
ChicagoDave
I’ve tried many systems, but Thoughtworks’ Mingle is still my favorite.

------
logicman
Brightpod :) Everything that needs to be tasked goes in there.

------
marmot777
Trello’s outstanding for relatively small projects.

------
unixhero
I use taiga projects. It's awesome.

------
deathtrader666
Nobody loves Basecamp anymore?

------
uloweb
Basecamp

