Select project management software for small size team or small business.

If you have a small size team anywhere between 2-10 people, I’m sure at somewhere in time, you have the need to manage the projects you have on hand.

What concerns you the most? What is your management style? Between me and my friends, we all have different perspectives and they can pretty much be categorized into three major groups

·         Project progress concerning estimated hours v.s actual hours

·         Project deliverables, milestones/phases, what needs to be done in each stage.

·         Tasks Based

Let me explain the above three different kinds of management style here before I get to my point.

Project progress concerning hours estimated v.s actual hours

The people manage projects this way normally work closely with budgeting and clients.  Before a contract starts, an estimate of the project is needed to give the clients a rough idea of how much the project might cost them.

Normally, these people talk with clients on what they want and break down the requirements in several major components and ask the team member who will be responsible for the specific components for their expertise along with a request for their estimate of the time it will cost them.

During the project, they want to make sure all hours are account for and that the projects stay in scope of the hours initially quoted. If the project is about to run out of hours or exceeded the hours, they need to re-negotiate again.  

            These people might be the account manager for the project or sales people.

Project deliverables, milestones/phases, what needs to be done in each stage.

Typically, these people are the project managers. They are concerned about delivery projects in a reasonable timeline within the scope defined and told by the clients.

They might not deal with the details of the day to day tasks, but it’s important for them to know in each stage, what needs to be done and what their status are in order to take appropriate actions and coordinate everything such as arrange meetings, send out reminders, talk with the team members and get the resources need for the team to complete the tasks.  If team members simply can’t finish within the timeframe, then he might either move it to the next deliverable or convey the difficulties back to the account managers.

Tasks Based

     I can speak this type for myself. As developers, while we are concerned about timeline, normally, we concern about them purely based on specific tasks. For example, by next week, I need to get these two pages done because a demo needs to be seen by the clients. Next week, I need to complete this section because that’s when the deliverable is due specified by the project manager.

     As to why the tasks needs to be done by certain timeframe, we don’t’ really care. We’ll let the managers worry about them. We simply needs to communicate with the project manager about the status of the things we have on hand. If certain things will be delayed, we let the manager know and why, this way the managers can decide how to coordinate the changes, maybe assign to another team member, maybe he think it’s not possible to finish in the current milestone and will move it to the next one.

Now that I explained the three types of people commonly seen in a project, but remember, we are talking about small size teams. It’s very possible that we share at least two of the responsibilities described above.

You could be the account manager as well as the project manager, or you could the project manager as well as part of the developer team yourself. Given the dynamics of the projects these days, most of us don’t have the luxury of having completely different people handling specific things. We need to move quickly and keep on top of every aspects of project is important to everybody.

So here is my point. If you are reading this article till here, then I’m sure you probably used quite a few bug tracking systems such as mantis, bugzilla and fogcreek just to name a few, but what’s wrong with this picture? They are “Task Based”. In another words, it doesn’t help the first two types of people I just described. How do they communicate with the clients without revealing all the details? How do they communicate a coordinate internal tasks among team members? How do they keep on top of the project status without going through jumps and hoops?

When selecting project management software, we have to consider all these requirements. We’re not talking about handling big projects here, so it doesn’t have to be really complicated, however it’s important for us to keep track of budgeting, milestones in addition to day to day tasks.

Depending on your interest and role, the software should provide an easy and simply quick access to the information that interest them. By far, most of the software out there, either have these information embedded deep into the thousands of features they have, makes it difficult to dig them out, or they are too simple or too specific, they can’t present themselves to the three different types of people.

From my own experience, while I’m quite satisfied with the bug tracker as a developer, but when it comes to handling project scope and interacting with clients, there are still gaps to be filled currently.

Hope some of my opinions here could help you make a decision on what types of project management software you will choose for your team.