The Effective Team Project Management Software

What makes effective project management software? In my mind, they are simplicity, usability, accountability and more importantly, communication. 

First of all, let’s get this off our back. Microsoft Project is not a solution.

The first reason is while M.S project provides lots of goodies, in fact, too much goodies to the point it’s simply too much and the time used in learning its behavior does not make it “effective”. It lost the battle on simplicity and usability.  In simple term, it’s not for your average Joe. For small size 2-20 people teams, it’s simply not worth to invest the time into get everyone trained.

Second reason and I don’t know about you, most of the times, other than the few people have M.S Project installed whom tends to be the managers, the rest of the team usually have out-dated information. 

In weekly meetings, our manager hand out a piece of the Gantt chart printout, but as  we all know, project requirements changes frequently, old features got written off for the future, new features increases both the estimated hours and actual  hours of the project or the current release, bug lists are always there and wish list keeps on coming back.  Beyond this point, you just can't get a good view of what your teammates are currently doing and what has changed for him/her in the last several days.  Again, it lost on the ground of accountability.

Last reason, these days, our teams are very dynamic. We engage in emails and discussions throughout the day, in fact, most of our ideas came from these back and forth discussions. More importantly, we all have clients, we engage in conversations with clients. How do we keep track and translate the discussion with our clients into tangible tasks?  M.S project simply lacks the ability to effectively materialize the information and facilitate communication.  

So yes, M.S project is good in itself  (project scope estimation, tasks, subtasks, auto delays all related tasks base on the condition of the current tasks, etc), in fact, it offers a lot great capabilities that are yet to be found in others  but the problem is that it’s quite often and easy to use it in a non-effective manner.

What other project management software then might make it “effective”? (Notice that I said the word “might”)
 
Let’s take a look at some open source ones.  “Mantis” and  “Bugzilla” came into our mind. First of all, let’s all be honest here and a shallow reason at that. Is it me or are they just ugly or hard to navigate around? Are they simple? Yes, but in terms of usability, far from it.

While effective, they are simply a “bug” tracker.  Though I have to admit, they do offer great reporting capabilities and allows us to build quite an extensive sets of filters to view  your tasks in different format.  Beyond bugs, it does not give you much in terms of managing the scope of your project.

Ask ourselves these questions. 

·        Can they tell me if my project is late?

·        Is my current milestone late?

·        How many hours are estimated for this project?

·        How does it compare to the actual hours spend such far?

·        What is the status of my team mates?

·        How many late tasks do they have and what are they?

·        How do we engage in discussions with our team mates? How do we brain-storm our ideas together and keep a record of them?

·        How do we keep track of which tasks came from which brain-storm ideas?

·        How do we proactively engage in our customers?

·        How can we keep our customers in synch with our development status?

Clearly, “Mantis” and  “Bugzilla” do not fit most of the requirements here. I can talk about other bug trackers out there, but because they are use to manage bugs and not project, let’s move onto some others that can answer our questions above.

So let’s step into the present and take a look at “Base-camp”. The latest and hottest webs based online project management and dissect its abilities.

• Simplicity is at its core. There is no doubt that basecamp is fairly easy to use
  
  
• Usability is again one of its strength. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how it works like M.S project.
  
  
• Accountability.  Here is the problem. While it can effectively manage to alert you of the late milestones, current tasks in the next few days and lists out a checklist of “to-dos” (as simple as it sounds, these are the things not often seen in others), it does not give you the insight as to the actual progress of your team. To-dos as it suggests, it’s nothing but an online notepad.
  
  
  
  
  So here we have to ask ourselves these questions, do they offer late tasks notification? What’s the status of the tasks? Have they started it or are they near completion? What needs to be done in certain milestones? How do we break up the tasks in phases and manage/planning my to-dos? What’s the status of my project in its entirety? How many hours are estimated v.s actual hours spent? These are just some of its issues.
  
  While it excelled in areas of notifications, it lacked the much needed bug tracking abilities that you normally need to actually EFFECTIVELY track your team mate’s activities.
  
  
• Facilitate communication through discussion is another core feature offered in basecamp.
  
  However, if you have used basecamp long enough, you’ll soon find out it’s simply hard to keep track of to-dos and the discussions.  It’s as if you archived month of email and when you want to track what needed to be done and what has been done from all those discussions? You are out of luck.
  
  Other questions I want to know are things like what was concluded from the original discussions? What needed to be done from the discussions? Which milestone was this discussion talking about?  What are the lists of to-dos in a milestone?
  
  In reverse, looking at your long lists of to-dos, there is simply no way for you to remember why you had this to-do in the first place. What was the initial discussions that turned into this concrete tasks? How do you get back to the initial reasoning of doing this or that for this task?
  
  

While basecamp excels in areas of simplicity, usability and pass accountability, the problem is it doesn’t manage a project well, after all, our goal and the keyword is “manage”. For a project with a decent amount of requirement discussions and have the need to manage the tasks of multiple teammates across several milestones and phases, you might very easily find yourself loose yourself in basecamp.

I’ve talked about the pros and cons of some examples out there that are considered mainstream. The best idea is to try them out yourself and judge base on your own experience.

Based on our past experiences, while we used basecamp to engage in our clients, we used mantis to keep track the actual to-dos. However, the combination still does not giving us the full picture of our project and answer the questions we have asked above throughout the article.

This ends my little speech of yet another day.

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