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Ask HN: How do you deal with so many project management systems?

• collyw 10y ago
  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).
• shubhamjain 10y ago
  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.
• apercu 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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?
• LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  Don't treat your customers' project management systems as your own organization tools. Instead, treat them as deliverables and manage your own organization elsewhere.
  • tootie 10y ago
    We've done this before, but it becomes in and of itself.
  • wwkeyboard 10y ago
    I've found the same applies to corporate organization tools. I manage my tasks separately with "update JIRA" being one of those tasks.
    • stephengillie 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        Well he does, in his own systems. Not in yours. Is my guess.
        • hosh 10y ago
          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 10y ago
  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.
  • vladnyc 10y ago
    Any plans to add redbooth.com?
    • fixie 10y ago
      We'll gladly consider adding Redbooth. Shoot us an email at support@tacoapp.com. We'd love to hear how you are using it.
  • cauterized 10y ago
    Hmmmm.... I'd be much more likely to take the time to sign up to use this thing if there were a handful of screenshots showing what it's like to use.
  • dpcan 10y ago
    Taco looks pretty slick, I'm definitely checking that out, thank you!
  • lukeholder 10y ago
    Put a slack bot interface in front of this and I will love you forever.
    • fixie 10y ago
      Actually, we are in the works of releasing a Slack connector. Star a message or DM in Slack and see it as a task in Taco. Taco only asks for and obtains access to your starred messages (on https://api.slack.com/docs/oauth-scopes https://api.slack.com/docs/oauth-scopes, "stars:list" and "stars:remove"), not all archives. Shoot us an email at support@tacoapp.com if you'd like to help us test it out!
• greenspot 10y ago
  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 10y ago
  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
• cpeterso 10y ago
  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.. :)
• mathattack 10y ago
  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 10y ago
  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.
• smileysteve 10y ago
  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.
• mtrpcic 10y ago
  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.
• SimplGy 10y ago
  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/a516c54a81fb24f807f9512fed820935 https://gist.github.com/SimplGy/a516c54a81fb24f807f9512fed82...
  • jkmcf 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
• stratejos 10y ago
  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.