
Ask HN: What sucks in the project management software you use? - altern8
I&#x27;m thinking about building a simple project management tool, since Basecamp did&#x27;t really work for us.<p>Is there something you hate in your project management tool?
======
heavenlyhash
There are no organizational queues. There are only our dreams.

So, acknowledge that. Wouldn't it be cool if our project management tools
actual admitted each user has their own priorities, and just helped us
communicate it clearly? Every user gets their own queue. Only that user can
modify it. If the user's queue of "up next" tasks is out of sync with what a
PM wants, the PM can see that... and they have to _go talk to the person_.

There's a core mismatch in current tools between purpose and practical use:
_we let people use the planning tool as a cudgel in place of real
communication_.

We need to have a shot at fixing that underlying issue. It's this hidden
cudgel nature of issue trackers that spawns the more literal problems already
mentioned in this thread (e.g. some people _always_ want to add another field
to Jira, etc -- which, sidenote, yes, oh my god). Worshipping the false idol
of minimalism by stripping the ability to have custom fields won't help.
Instead, redirect energy so there's simply no desire to add bureaucratic
layers in the first place. If adding more custom fields won't give someone
with a micromanagement complex any more power (either illusory or real) to
poke your task queue around without communicating, then... why would they make
custom fields? Incentives for bad behavior disappear, and so does the bad
behavior.

One of the coincidental UX wins of per-user task queues is there's an obvious
visual place to highlight when one person has too much on their plate, and we
can use patterns in the UI to try to help. Similarly, it gives a FOSS
developer a very clear way to say "yes, I care; at the same time, here's
absolute transparency on the short list of issues I'm currently moving on." On
the other hand, one of the commiserate challenges would be ensuring everyone
can navigate to the same places in the same way; breaking that symmetry
between how different people navigate the tool makes it much more complex for
group use.

I've never seen a tool try this. Might be a bum idea. Definitely a little
radical. The UX would be full of new challenges. I'd love to see it though,
and would definitely be excited to try a system that thinks out of the box.

~~~
jacques_chester
Tracker has this some of this. You can filter to just items that you are
working on.

I haven't seen it used much, because of the way we work at Pivotal Labs. The
standard work method is to pick the next story, bug or chore off the top of
the backlog and start it. Not much need for "what's mine?" filtering in that
case.

As for talking, I agree. That's why we colocate. I ask my PM by turning
around.

~~~
heavenlyhash
Well, I must admit I meant s/talking/any kind of direct communication/, but if
colocating works for you... :) Just to offer the view from the other side, I'm
currently working with a group that's very embracing of remote work and fluid
schedules, and still easily ranks as one of the most highly communicative and
well-organized places I've had the fortune of experiencing.

It's hard to look straight at a good situation and say "why" the magic is
there with any certainty. That said, from this group I've noticed our PMs are
very focused on asking developers questions to help keep the issue tracking to
reflect their work, and very rarely make any changes until discussing them
out-of-band. Doesn't matter if it's in person or over Slack or video Hangouts;
it's the pattern of involvement that seems to cause the spark. It's a habit I
definitely intend to try to take with me.

I'm not sure user-oriented queues could be completely emulated with view
filters. Maybe it's possible, but optional views seem to have limited impact
on the overall flow of work unless _everyone_ in the team agrees to use them.

As an aside, the abundance of optional views and filters is one of my biggest
beefs with the likes of JIRA. The first thing I do if contracting within a new
group that uses JIRA is ask _exactly_ which views and filters the PM uses to
navigate the backlog, because otherwise I'm hopelessly lost as far as getting
on their wavelength... and this makes customizable view features quite the
irony to me! Tracker mostly seems to dodge this bullet since everyone lands
looking at the same lanes in the same order by default, which is cool -- that
kind of informational inertia in layout and navigation is huge. (That concept
of inertia also jives well with per-user queues: someone can freely organize
their own tasks in a personally meaningful way without wrecking the inertia
another user's view.) The trick is keeping that inertia feature intact when
huge amounts of info gets dumped into the system. And I'm _totally_ on board
with the countpoint "you just shouldn't have that many tasks, because you're
fibbing yourself anyway", but at the same time, I really can't recommend a big
enterprise starts just haemorrhaging security tickets from the record entirely
if they can't keep their todo list short enough.

Perhaps length-limited per-user queues combined with different mechanisms for
"not on anyone's radar today" backlog grooming can find a new sweet spot?

------
techdragon
Don't build your own before you try Phabricator
[http://phabricator.org](http://phabricator.org)

It's one of the most comprehensive tools I've ever used and its also not an
unwieldy beast like other tools with a similar breadth of features. I'm
probably never going to try and administer Jira for a small team ever again
after the grief it brought me but I'm still quite happy with my own personal
Phabricator installation, it just works.

~~~
tyre
While I agree that Jira is a nightmare, having used Phabricator in production
for almost 2 years I loathe that software.

Each of its applications was 70% as good as what else is out there (especially
UX-wise) and the integrations compared with Github were pitiful.

------
busterarm
The thing that I hate about Basecamp is the same thing that I hate about every
other piece of project management software.

Stakeholders and lack of/ignorance of responsibility.

It really doesn't matter what piece of software you use as long as everyone
uses it the same way. Often, in my experience, the best way of doing this is
having a single person in control of (meaning write access to) the project.
(okay, maybe everyone can comment).

A lot of businesses use this software instead of bringing on or training
actual project managers. Then you have tickets being passed around between
teams and stuff gets lost. People don't speak up when there's problems or bury
their heads in the sand and try to deflect blame to others. Those same people
will use the software, whatever piece of software, to their advantage.

There really always needs to be a captain at the wheel making sure everyone is
100% clear on what their responsibility is and where the blame will fall if
things slip. Software can't do this for you, I don't care what its features
are. This is 99% of the time the reason why people aren't happy with their
project management software.

------
BjoernKW
No, I'm using Trello and GitHub Issues in my own company and I haven't any
major gripes with those.

For larger projects, especially in software development, I usually recommend
JIRA. It might seem a bit intimidating and process-heavy but it's very
flexible and works well with agile processes, too.

My general recommendation would be keeping it simple for as long as you can
(i.e. Trello, GitHub or the like). If your organization has grown beyond those
simple means both Basecamp and JIRA are good options (the former being more on
the opinionated side, the latter offering a lot more flexibility).

That said, given the myriad of project management options I can't think of any
reason to build yet another project management tool. You say Basecamp doesn't
exactly work for you. What's so wrong with it that makes you want to develop
another tool (Which is no small endeavour by the way. It took 37signals
literally a decade to get Basecamp to where it's right now.)?

------
wilsynet
Jira is so awesome and bad at the same time that almost everyone who uses it
hates it but can't find anything better.

I tried to leave Jira once and after a 6 month experiment realized how much
better Jira was than everything else out there.

~~~
tootie
If you're a big organization and have some expertise, it really works best.
Gives so much rope to hang yourself, but if find a good setup that works for
your kind of projects, it's a thing of beauty. I'm at a huge organization
right now that has a mandated JIRA setup for every project and it's awful and
we're stuck with it.

~~~
mgkimsal
for a lot of projects, I don't see much difference between jira and other
stuff, but when it's paired with confluence, and people can do project
planning pages, then create and link issues, it's quite an org boon. Even for
small projects with just a few people, the 'biz' folks can stay safely in
english document/wiki land, and not have to try to wade in to jira/tickets all
the time.

But, yeah, at the same time, it's sort of 'too flexible' up front, and
requires a lot of decision making (which feels like you can make the 'wrong'
decision). I think they've done some better guided setup stuff in smaller
chunks in the past couple years, but need to go further.

Choose from:

"I'm a small team with 3 people"

"We're a dev shop with 12 people over 2 teams"

"We're 75 folks with 5 teams and 8 projects"

And have the system autoconfigure a recommended setup.

------
edoceo
I hate when multiple items get tagged as TOP-PRIORITY. Visual work flow
prevents this but others let dozens of items sit with the same top weight. How
can you tell what top needs are when everything is a top need.

I wish more tools actually forced managers to put one thing in front of
another - like in the real world

------
mud_dauber
I've yet to see a project management tool that allowed for uncertainty (say, a
normal distribution) in estimating task efforts. And I've yet to see a
technical team know their own capabilities for a task of > 1 week within 50%,
mostly because every task is unique, and (nearly) every project team has
inexperienced members.

A project management tool should have the ability to Monte Carlo estimations.

~~~
andrewl
FogBugz, from Fog Creek Software, uses Monte Carlo simulation in its evidence-
based scheduling tool:

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html)

~~~
mud_dauber
Nice! I'm all in favor of evidence-based estimations if the underlying data is
available.

------
lowmagnet
Jira: The people using it.

The "solution" to every "problem"* seems to be more fields to some people. Or
perhaps you want another report? Madness.

* "Problem" being something with people's wetware, so just add baby-sitting.

------
aaronbrethorst
I use JIRA. JIRA, ahem, "sucks":
[https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=jira+su...](https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=jira+sucks&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)

~~~
fumar
What are your top three complaints?

~~~
perryh2
I wish that GitHub offered some sort of project management as part of their
Enterprise product. We use JIRA and GH Enterprise and the experience feels
disconnected.

------
hex13
Asset management (for example graphic files).

I'm frontend dev and I often work on images/designs/psd's made by designers
and I find it cumbersome to manually find image each time I need and to
download manually to my project folder via "Save as" browser option and then
copy from Downloads folder to project's folder. I think It should be
automatic. Click on image and it lands in my project's asset folder (BTW this
could be hard in pure web based apps. Such app would need to be desktop based
to have access to hard drive).

And it should display path image was saved, to allow me to copy and paste this
path to my code.

And it should display me notifications where designers put a new version of
image.

I'm also disappointed when a tool doesn't offer to make comments on graphic
assets or drawing arrows.

~~~
noir_lord
Could do it with a Browser extension though, I use one for FF that allows you
double click one and sent it where I want.

------
cdcarter
My firm uses a combination of tools: Basecamp (2), Trello, and Slack
(internally only). We use Trello to track user stories and sprint planning,
and Basecamp for outside-of-meeting communication, QA assignments to clients,
client todo items, and file management (with Google Drive).

We get annoyed at these limitations of Trello: cant assign checklist items,
can't have discussion on checklist items.

We get annoyed at these limitations of Basecamp: projects quickly turn into
checklist hell, cannot connect ANYTHING to it's user story, poor calendaring.

We've looked at JIRA, but it's just not client friendly, and we really don't
want another tool in the mix.

------
brudgers
Is what people hate in existing software is the right place to start for new
software? By which I mean, not using any software at all removes the things I
hate, and the reason I use software that has features I hate is because of the
features I don't.

Things I hate seems like a good starting point for automating an existing
manual task, but interestingly, a lot of contemporary project management is
moving toward manual/physical processes or hybrids where manual process play a
significant role: e.g. physical Kanban boards.

One thing that sucks about a lot of software is that it takes up screen space.

Good luck.

------
TheJixers
We've built an awesome alternative to JIRA. Tons of JIRA users have been
switching to our platform.

[https://jixee.me/](https://jixee.me/)

~~~
highCs
Look great. I know it may sound ridiculous, and it is, but your website is not
a .com and that quickly sounds like a pet project you might abandon in 2 weeks
(or whatever one can associate with a pet project). While your soft looks like
a great and complete one. That's my feedback, you can discard it at will.
Also, it seems to me your pricing is weird. You should polarize it: free for
whoever needs it for free or charge - but when you do, don't charge $19, but
$99, cause companies are buying your software, not students...

~~~
TheJixers
Totally agree with you on the .com. We're working on it.

------
eposner
I can sympathize with folks unhappy with their project management tools. My
team and I went one step further and tried to build the tool we weren't able
to find out there, htt://taiga.io.

We think our free, agile, open source tool has satisfied people. We're 1 year
into it, gotten 100,000 registered users, and have been highlighted as one of
the top 10 open source tools of 2014 and won the 2015 most valuable agile tool
from the agile awards.

Hope it can help some of you.

------
alexobenauer
We didn't like any of the options out there, so we rolled our own to get the
features we wanted: Slack integration, designed home page with our logo and
core purpose on it, integration with our shared Google Drive files.

The thing that sucks about it is that it was a home-built thing. It's really
rough around the edges and in order for it to get any better, someone on the
team would have to stop working on product, so it rarely improves. I'd love to
switch to something out there, so that I'm paying for a team whose sole focus,
full time, is to constantly make it better.

~~~
altern8
Thanks, alexobenauer.

For us, the pain was that the project changed too quickly for todo lists, so
most of the tasks wouldn't get completed and the whole thing represented what
we needed a week before, rather than today. Done lists vs. todo lists would
solve this (not sure if you're familiar with done lists, but they're awesome).

I guess everyone needs their own features, even on a per-project basic.

I guess it would be cool if you had plugins (like Slack/Google Drive
integration, etc.) and one could compose their own project management
environment by mixing these plugins together..?

------
Insalgo
In our company we are using now a mix of JIRA and Slack (sic!) with his 'Star
Message' option. In Slack, there is a 'Starred Items' list which works nice
for quick tasks lookup.

We've loved this way of sharing tasks to others so much that, we have even did
write about this way of creating todo-list here:
[http://www.insalgo.com/blog/2016/01/03/management-use-
cases-...](http://www.insalgo.com/blog/2016/01/03/management-use-cases-
keeping-in-touch)

------
tomasien
DEFINITELY do not stop your search for a third party at Basecamp. Basecamp has
re-organized their company to make Basecamp better so it is worth keeping an
eye on them (and worth giving them the benefit of the doubt) but Basecamp is
absolutely horrible. I don't know how that was allowed to happen, but it is
bottom of the barrel. Try Asana or Trello before giving up on a third party.

~~~
hotcool
The new Basecamp 3 has a very fragmented UI. Everything is siloed. And let's
face it, the purple pop-up navigation is darnright outlandish.

Basecamp 2 is excellent though.

------
georgeglue1
Good migrations between old teams and projects. JIRA fails when new teams need
to be created and non-trivial numbers of old tickets need to be
duplicated/migrated. It's messy, and context is always difficult to manage.

Also, accommodation for 'casual' users. It really is painful to onboard a
marketer that needs to watch a few tickets.

------
mbrock
I wish it was all inside of Git and had an Emacs mode. The trackpad on my
Linux computer is so terrible and if I can use the keyboard I'm way likelier
to manage projects properly in the thing. Please don't make me aim for little
X icons to delete stuff!

------
gamerDude
I've always wanted to have a quick look at where I am now, where I am wanting
to go and priority of how to get from now to future state. I am not sure how
to get that done, but I haven't found anything that really gives me a quick
view of that.

------
kayadx83
Anyone tried TeamWave? [http://www.teamwave.com/](http://www.teamwave.com/)

------
epynonymous
anyone have experience with asana? pivotal tracker was great for the agile
workflows, pretty simple. my company standardizes on rally, probably more
bloated than basecamp, jira, and asana combined.

~~~
tootie
Pivotal was too simple. Can't create assignable sub-tasks and attach bugs to a
story.

~~~
jacques_chester
Tracker's workflow is simple by design. I didn't like it, then I started
working at Pivotal Labs, and now I get it.

And you can create tasks per story.

Incidentally, "Pivotal" is the company. "Tracker" is the hosted product.

------
thejerz
Jira: Complexity.

Basecamp: Not enough complexity.

Both: Pricing that isn't sensitive to smaller orgs.

------
pshyco
Visual Studio Online - Can't Sort Tasks, Can't Filter ....

------
epynonymous
nobody has any experience with asana?

~~~
itomato
Not a positive one.

