I had been running my company of 5 employees for several years and never was able to get overview of projects and good and transparent feedback from the makers. This led me to create a new way to work that I am now turning into a method and an app.
The foundation of the method is
1) Leave the makers alone so they can be as much as possible in flow
2) Inform the Managers, honestly and transparent so they have total overview and sleep better.
3) Commit and be acountable to team members, manager and customers about what you will do during the week to improve internal motivation
4) Learn from mistakes, discuss how to learn from failures and how you can behave differently to prevent making the same mistakes.
Read more on http://timeblock.com and sign up for the newsletter to get the method in a three day course.
If you use GitHub, then ZenHub is a great option. It is a Chrome extension which adds project management functionality inside the GitHub interface.
Disclosure: I work at ZenHub - the favourite feedback I get is how much it cuts down on context switching between where developers want to live - GitHub, and where Project Managers want to live Jira/Trello/etc, as everyone can work directly from GitHub Issues.
JIRA [1]. You get the benefits of a Project Management tool coupled with bug tracking, and can expand to other products within Atlassian's family, including Confluence, HipChat, etc.
A whiteboard. Costs a penny and pays a fortune. Or a bunch of whiteboards. Cover the walls in them.
And pens (of course, lots of colours) and other things to stick to them, like Lego bricks with sticky bottoms (workflow/queues), and post-it notes (that are able to stick to whiteboards, a lot of post-its can't), and a countdown timer for your huddles so they don't take that little bit too long, and multiple small screens stuck there too if you have workflow or queues.
And a webcam permanently on if you have a remote employee/partner 'visit' the office on-demand but don't record them because they're likely working from home and they'd like their home privacy.
All of these, and more, are cheap, simple, tactile, and can be mixed around until you find something that fits.
We use Breeze.pm for task management at our 30 people company. It is a lightweight Trello-like dashboard with just a bit more functionality than Trello has.
We've been using it for about a month, and looks like it's exactly what we need. Previously we used JIRA, but it would be more precisely to say we made several approaches to start using JIRA, and every time after sing it for 1-2 weeks we slowly ceased. It looked too heavy for our small company and our environment, no one wanted to deal with it.
Now with Breeze.pm we have project dashboards, some integrations with HipChat, Github, Slack. Notifications, calendar, groups of projects, search and filters - and a nice and responsive UI attached. We also like the developer of Breeze who is open for questions and suggestions.
My team just went through trello, asana, and JIRA over the last three months. We came to the conclusion that Asana is the best combo between trello and JIRA.
If your team is heavy tech, then go JIRA, all other, I would say asana. Personal use, trello.
If you are more focused on tasks than chats you might like trello.com or even just workflowy.com. I wouldn't say they are Project Management tools, but they can help the processes go forward.
If you are doing Agile and/or Waterfall, you can have a look at Tuleap[1].
Pretty good at Scrum, Kanban is in progress (some features already there and a first delivery in June).
Net benefit: you get one tool for project management, source control and tracking (bug, todo, etc) in one central place with easy administration. Plus, it's fully open source!
I had been running my company of 5 employees for several years and never was able to get overview of projects and good and transparent feedback from the makers. This led me to create a new way to work that I am now turning into a method and an app.
The foundation of the method is 1) Leave the makers alone so they can be as much as possible in flow 2) Inform the Managers, honestly and transparent so they have total overview and sleep better. 3) Commit and be acountable to team members, manager and customers about what you will do during the week to improve internal motivation 4) Learn from mistakes, discuss how to learn from failures and how you can behave differently to prevent making the same mistakes.
Read more on http://timeblock.com and sign up for the newsletter to get the method in a three day course.