
Ask HN: How do you deal with so many project management systems? - dpcan
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.<p>I&#x27;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.<p>No longer are project management systems keeping me organized, it&#x27;s turned into a mess.<p>Do you deal with this too?  Are there any solutions out there that can interface with all these major systems at once?
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LeifCarrotson
Don't treat your customers' project management systems as your own
organization tools.

Instead, treat them as deliverables and manage your own organization
elsewhere.

~~~
wwkeyboard
I've found the same applies to corporate organization tools. I manage my tasks
separately with "update JIRA" being one of those tasks.

~~~
stephengillie
I hope you at least leave notes about what you do. Few things are more
infuriating than seeing a complex task assigned to someone, and the next entry
is "Solved." and the ticket closed. Great that the problem was solved, but the
corporate organization tool exists to make solution information more available
to others with the same problem.

In a way, ticket systems are another type of documentation, along with man
pages and KB articles and persistent chat (like Slack).

~~~
Scarblac
Well he does, in his own systems. Not in yours. Is my guess.

~~~
hosh
Sure, though adding in note is a kind of signaling -- a social mechanism that
helps teams come together. If someone is working as a contractor, is
relatively isolated from the team, then there probably won't be a need or even
a desire for the contractor to add notes to the client's management system,
for the sake of signaling to the in-house development team. On the other hand,
some sort of notes tend to make many non-technical clients feel better and be
on top of things. (And some people are confused by signaling; a good
communicator would be able to suss that out).

------
fixie
We actually ran into the exact same problem while juggling multiple projects
and ended up creating Taco - [https://tacoapp.com](https://tacoapp.com). Taco
aggregates your Basecamp, Trello, Asana and 35+ other services into a single
screen so you can prioritize your day across multiple services. Works
especially well with a new tab Chrome extension.

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.

~~~
dabeeeenster
Just some feedback - it drives me nuts when services aren't clear what their
pricing is. If it's free, fine. If it's paid, fine. If it's free now but you
plan on charging later for premium features, fine. But IMO you _have_ to be
upfront about it.

There's nothing on the homepage, no pricing page, nothing. It makes me nervous
to sign up without this information.

~~~
buro9
This, a million times over.

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.

~~~
fixie
Taco is free for now, but we expect and hope to charge $5-$10/month at some
point - cheap enough be a fantastic value for anyone who uses it even
occasionally, but also not a free service that you rightly don't want. We're
still figuring out when we should flip the switch but in the meantime, you are
right, we need to do a better job of explaining possible future pricing.

~~~
tudorw
So the plan is to generate an initial spike in demand from a group of people
marginally interested in something they can get for free, then alienate your
core users, who would have been happy to pay from the outset, by introducing a
fee, but only once the service is sufficiently overburdened supporting free
users ? Well they say any plan is better than no plan... but....

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!

~~~
tracker1
+1 on this... I'd say do a 30-day trial period, then around day 25 ask for
billing information... If you have tracking/analytics in place you know how
many users are returning once signing up, and you have a better indication of
conversion after use.

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.

~~~
tudorw
+1 for all that although I'd be tempted to get the billing info on sign up and
offer a 'throwaway' good deal for the uncertain, so, say $50 a month, or try
10 days for $3

------
SimplGy
A big text file, with a heading for each day.

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...](https://gist.github.com/SimplGy/a516c54a81fb24f807f9512fed820935)

~~~
jkmcf
I've been doing this in Evernote for years -- one note for each month, and now
I've switched to Quiver which provides a somewhat better experience.

~~~
SimplGy
Quiver looks really interesting, thanks for sharing. I love that you can
export as plain text or markdown. The idea that this would count as "no vendor
lock in" to me hinges on exactly _how_ the text export works -- when exported,
can I go back to a text-only experience pretty easily, or will I have 1000s of
separate text files for each "cell". Sort of a tangent, but hey.

------
greenspot
That's not easy to answer. You need them but you need to limit them as well.
Also you have to be cautious of ADD coworkers who introduce new tools every
week, 'hey look I found a new Trello integration, ...'

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

------
RelaxSelf
Juggling systems is goofy but as long as they're web based it's easy, go old
school

+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

------
mtrpcic
1\. As others have said, don't treat the tools provided by your clients as
"organizational tools", treat the communication via those tools as a part of
the deliverable they are paying for. If they have a convoluted system, ensure
you are paid accordingly if it will take you a long time to use it the way
they are asking.

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.

------
stratejos
We face this problem as well. We are working across multiple systems and
sometimes unable to take advantage of the various triggers/reports etc we had
setup in our own JIRA, which meant we had to work harder to deliver to the
same standard.

So, we developed a robo-advisor to deal with it called stratejos
([http://stratejos.com](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.

------
mathattack
This isn't a new problem. I used to have to enter my time in 3 places. Once
for the client's corporate system, once for the project-based system, and once
for my company's system. As much as we like innovation, this is part of the
case for standardization. :-)

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.

------
tracker1
One suggestion, and I'm not how hard it is to setup a new account with a real
phone number, or moving the number. But setup Google Voice, and use hangouts
to manage your text messages. You'll be able to run hangouts on your desktop,
and type your text messages, not to mention copy/paste wherever they are
needed.

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.

------
apercu
I feel your pain. A few weeks ago I was even asked to track my time in a
clients system. First thought was "but I send you invoices with my time in
them."

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.

~~~
rwallace
I sympathize, but honestly, the fourth thought - that you don't want to do the
data entry the client has agreed to pay you for - is a bad thought that you
need to evict from your brain ASAP. You should want to do it. It's a good deal
- you get paid the same rate for easy work that you would get paid for hard
work. We technologists sometimes get bad thoughts in our heads that are
variants of the idea that we have the power and responsibility to optimise the
entire universe, but in reality of course we have no such thing, and we need
to get rid of those thoughts and draw appropriate boundaries.

~~~
apercu
You're right. I think it's aa timing thing. In June-August or December I'd be
happy to get to invoice for simple admin work. But I seem to be slammed Jan-
May every year (lots of weekend work, business travel) so it just seems
excessive right now.

You are also correct that we want to optimize everything. Sigh.

~~~
tedmiston
Have you considered a personal assistant for it?

If the output would be the same whether it was done by you or someone else...
well, why not explore _not_ doing it yourself?

------
cpeterso
I'm curious whether big companies like Google or Facebook have a standard
project management process or software used by all teams. I work at Mozilla
and every team is doing their own thing, which can make collaboration
difficult. We have Bugzilla bugs, GitHub issues, wikis, Mana (Confluence's
wiki), Google Docs and spreadsheets, Trello, Smartsheets, Aha, and JIRA. Even
when people agree there is a problem, no team wants to be the one to change
their process.. :)

------
shubhamjain
One thing about Project Management that had always struck me why is this space
so fragmented and why there is no clear winner? You can create a project
management tool now with a new perspective and I am sure you will have
customers for it.

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.

------
smileysteve
Consider using a different user per account - the gain having a dedicated
chrome / safari password. Auxiliary gain, this will keep you more focused on
one client at a time.

------
collyw
Google Docs was honestly the best system I have used to date. Skim the others.
Put the important stuff from them in a Google doc. Important stuff at the top
(everything else will naturally fall into less important). Highlight extra
things as you see the need. No farting about having to learn yet another
system that doesn't quite meet your needs.

(Might be worth adding that all the companies I have worked at for the last
few years were under resourced).

