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My current workplace is pretty lean and flexible when it comes to this kind of thing, and we've tried a few different project management solutions over the year

My current workplace is pretty lean and flexible when it comes to this kind of thing, and we've tried a few different project management solutions over the years. Without fail, the new solution looks great at first glance and feels great as we start using it. Then it gradually becomes annoying and horrible just like the last one, and people start yearning for Jira. The horrible-ness usually comes from straight up bugs, a lack of comprehensive reporting, weak integrations with other tools, and/or a UX that doesn't jive with certain roles/people. I think it'd be a real challenge to meaningfully compete with Jira. You'd need to not only match its feature set but also be faster than it and less buggy. It seems that being a "not Jira" gets you a good amount of customers off the bat due to how much people loath Jira, but it'll probably take a paradigm shift or a very competent team to overthrow it.

xwowsersx 2y ago
Right. It does feel that way. Jira is the worst project management software, except for all the others.
mikepurvis 2y ago
IMO Jira is the epitome of a tool being what you make of it. If you keep things simple and pick the slice of features that work for you, don't go crazy with plugins or creating extra ticket fields or mandatory workflow restrictions, you'll be fine. If you have multiple PMs each trying to impose their own view of the world expressed in ticket form, it'll be a fiasco.
- j45 2y ago
  Very true. I am a reluctant user of JIRA, and once I was past the realization that JIRA isn't meant to be used out of the box, but rather meet your process and production where it is, it kind of fell into place, and there are few pieces of software that can remain straightforward in one area, and be good at absorbing details and complexity as things pop. Linear looks pretty interesting too.
netghost 2y ago
I'm curious, what reporting is actually useful to your team. I used to work on a project management tool, and everyone wanted "reporting", but when you got down to what they needed it was usually pretty minimal.
- GiorgioG 2y ago
  The "Will it be done before/at the unreasonable deadline?" report.
  - mikepurvis 2y ago
    Indeed. I think the most interesting and worthwhile reporting hinges on having pretty rich metadata attached to the tickets, so you can answer questions like how many man-hours did feature X take? how much over the estimate was that? how consistent is that compared with prior similar features? stacking up the critical path from now until release, and given the present estimates and past history, what timeframe are we looking at? But to really get anywhere with that you need everyone to have put in the required metadata, to be correctly linking tickets that block each other, to be providing estimates upfront and tracking time, to be accurately capturing the work in tickets. You also need people not to be sandbagging and then using the "extra" time to perform localized refactors and other cleanup that they can't otherwise get buy-in for.
  - netghost 2y ago
    This was exactly what LiquidPlanner did (probably does?). I can't speak for it today, but it was built as planning and scheduling first, task management second. As a bonus we handled everything a ranges (that task? 1-4 days) so you'd get results like: this project is 90% likely to be done by a given date, 98% by this much later date you're going to hate.
    - dotancohen 2y ago
      $15 monthly per user, and I can't even demo the software without scheduling an appointment? LiquidPlanner might be the greatest software in the world but I can not schedule an appointment for a demo - my opportunities are far too spontaneous for that. This seems like software for people who like to schedule things - I need software for people who are forced to schedule things.

xwowsersx 2y ago

Right. It does feel that way. Jira is the worst project management software, except for all the others.

mikepurvis 2y ago

IMO Jira is the epitome of a tool being what you make of it. If you keep things simple and pick the slice of features that work for you, don't go crazy with plugins or creating extra ticket fields or mandatory workflow restrictions, you'll be fine. If you have multiple PMs each trying to impose their own view of the world expressed in ticket form, it'll be a fiasco.

j45 2y ago
Very true. I am a reluctant user of JIRA, and once I was past the realization that JIRA isn't meant to be used out of the box, but rather meet your process and production where it is, it kind of fell into place, and there are few pieces of software that can remain straightforward in one area, and be good at absorbing details and complexity as things pop. Linear looks pretty interesting too.

netghost 2y ago

I'm curious, what reporting is actually useful to your team. I used to work on a project management tool, and everyone wanted "reporting", but when you got down to what they needed it was usually pretty minimal.

GiorgioG 2y ago
The "Will it be done before/at the unreasonable deadline?" report.
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  Indeed. I think the most interesting and worthwhile reporting hinges on having pretty rich metadata attached to the tickets, so you can answer questions like how many man-hours did feature X take? how much over the estimate was that? how consistent is that compared with prior similar features? stacking up the critical path from now until release, and given the present estimates and past history, what timeframe are we looking at? But to really get anywhere with that you need everyone to have put in the required metadata, to be correctly linking tickets that block each other, to be providing estimates upfront and tracking time, to be accurately capturing the work in tickets. You also need people not to be sandbagging and then using the "extra" time to perform localized refactors and other cleanup that they can't otherwise get buy-in for.
- netghost 2y ago
  This was exactly what LiquidPlanner did (probably does?). I can't speak for it today, but it was built as planning and scheduling first, task management second. As a bonus we handled everything a ranges (that task? 1-4 days) so you'd get results like: this project is 90% likely to be done by a given date, 98% by this much later date you're going to hate.
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    $15 monthly per user, and I can't even demo the software without scheduling an appointment? LiquidPlanner might be the greatest software in the world but I can not schedule an appointment for a demo - my opportunities are far too spontaneous for that. This seems like software for people who like to schedule things - I need software for people who are forced to schedule things.