I've used Jira, Pivotal Tracker, Trello, Asana, Zenhub, and other project management software that was written internally.
In my opinion, based on my needs on every project I've worked on, I've yet to use a project management software that did anything better than a simple Trello board or the like. At the end of the day, I want a list of tasks, a way to indicate the status on the task, a discussion section for the task, and to be able to close it when I'm finished. That's about 99% of what I need it for. Well, besides the fact that it also should provide insight to management.
My issue with project management software that's more complicated than a set of to-do lists is that they seem to be designed to make you invest in that specific product. They are different enough from each other in terms of layout and workflow that they are unique yet those differences offer no clear value. Depending on which one you use, you have a "task", or a "story", or a "ticket", or an "issue", or something entirely unique if it was written by some clever person for internal PM software.
Then there are concepts like "milestones", "epics", "iterations", and "sprints" (speaking of more concepts I've never needed). You might be "assigned" a task, or perhaps you are the "owner". It's all so tainted by Agile that we have to speak this goofy ass language which makes us feel more sophisticated than the rest of the world which... does the same thing using common verbage.
Worst of all is these tools have barely any meaningful integration with source control hosting like GitHub or GitLab. Yes, they can do nifty things like show the title of the GitHub issue, but every place I've worked for forced me to ping pong between the PM software and GitHub/Lab and I always ended up having to manually sync things between the two. Or I would have to manually copy information between the PM software and whatever non-engineers were using, like Asana.
Like, I really don't care that badly about having to sync some things by hand, but it's a nuisance when the tool pretends to be advanced by shoving a bunch of information, terminology, and processes in my face. Give me a tool that will stay out of my way.
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Oh, yes, the article.
> The thing I really like about this idea is that the user can organize their hierarchy however they like. They are not restricted to what the software defines as an “epic.”
Yep, exactly. It should get out of the way and not force organizations or individuals into hard and fast paradigms. Funny how we overuse abstractions in code but our project management tools are overly concrete.
> Want to create a sprint? Create a circle and reference other circles within it. Want to create an epic? Create a circle and reference other circles within it. Want to view your circle and its children as a kanban? It supports that. Want to move circles around, such as nesting them or unnesting them? It’s as easy as pressing “tab” or “shift+tab.”
Although obviously I'm not a fan of adding more neologisms, the way that circles work here definitely sounds appealing in terms of flexibility. In this case, it kind of makes sense since a circle doesn't necessarily have to represent anything in particular besides what the user wants it to be.
> I want a project management solution that:
> - Emphasizes team collaboration
> - Is able to scale with a company’s growth
> - A playground for teams to experiment and build tasks
> - Ability to capture OKRs (objectives and key results)
> - Task management
Most project management software claims to do most of those things. Not that you aren't right in wanting those things, but the possibilities circles have is the main selling point IMO.
Amen ravenstine. "A tool that stays out of your team’s way" is quite literally the tagline of the Trello-for-devs product I'm working on (Constructor, https://constructor.dev/).
As to the article, I agree with a lot of the author's points. The author talks about lack of features for collaboration. and I agree. What's wrong with the comment systems in Trello or Jira? I think it's that they don't model how people actually collaborate, which often goes something like this: (1) I have a question for someone else on the team, (2) that person answers or passes it to someone else who can, (3) repeat until I've got the answer, (4) reflect the answer somewhere (designs, description, etc.), (5) consider the matter resolved. Many of these might be going on in parallel, and the back-and-forth is often asynchronous. A single comment stream just doesn't lend itself to this kind of collaboration. Neither does Slack where, as the author says, requests for follow-up easily get lost.
The extreme flexibility of the "circles" is interesting. On the one hand, it's nice to give control over to the users and let them model whatever use case they have. On the other, a tool that's too open-ended may overwhelm users with options when they should really be focusing on dev. (Of course, that could be solved with intelligent default templates, or something along those lines.) I'm curious to read others thoughts about that.
> On the other, a tool that's too open-ended may overwhelm users with options when they should really be focusing on dev.
Author here. I agree. A big concern is I build this flexible system and a user jumps in to use it and sees a blank screen. No story section, no sprint section, no epic section. They get bewildered and end up not using it. Do you have any other thoughts on how to combat users being overwhelmed by a blank screen? I could have templates that people could "load" that would set a project up like a traditional project mgmt solution would?
Yeah, templates for "traditional" structures sounds reasonable. Or along the same lines, it might be sufficient to have purely illustrative versions of those setups ("here's how some teams have used this"), to get the idea across, even if they can't be "loaded" as a template.
> In my opinion, based on my needs on every project I've worked on, I've yet to use a project management software that did anything better than a simple Trello board or the like.
Author here, I totally agree with you! I love using trello but every org I've worked at eventually outgrows it and moves onto something more akin to Trello. Why do you think that is?
> My issue with project management software that's more complicated than a set of to-do lists is that they seem to be designed to make you invest in that specific product.
Definitely. As a team lead there's this natural inclination to make your sprint "perfect." I've gone down the rabbit hole of creating a strict workflow where cards have to move from status to status in a specific order. People end up overriding it and doing what they want. And at least for startups, most of the tickets we thought were important, in a few months, are totally irrelevant, thus negating all the work that was done to get those cards properly written.
I'm hoping that I can keep what makes Trello great but add just a touch more team collaboration and project managemenemt-like features to make it so teams don't eventually jump ship to something like JIRA.
I agree that's there's lots of work that fits into a simple Kanban view well.
I do, though, often see stuff managed using Kanban when it's pretty clear that there are dependencies making the work out of sequence and inefficient. It seems there are fewer and fewer people that can break out a Gantt or Pert chart and identify stuff like "the critical path".
Task management seems simple enough that it should be doable on a general-purpose Google Sheets-like minimally programmable shared platform. If only we had one.
In my opinion, based on my needs on every project I've worked on, I've yet to use a project management software that did anything better than a simple Trello board or the like. At the end of the day, I want a list of tasks, a way to indicate the status on the task, a discussion section for the task, and to be able to close it when I'm finished. That's about 99% of what I need it for. Well, besides the fact that it also should provide insight to management.
My issue with project management software that's more complicated than a set of to-do lists is that they seem to be designed to make you invest in that specific product. They are different enough from each other in terms of layout and workflow that they are unique yet those differences offer no clear value. Depending on which one you use, you have a "task", or a "story", or a "ticket", or an "issue", or something entirely unique if it was written by some clever person for internal PM software.
Then there are concepts like "milestones", "epics", "iterations", and "sprints" (speaking of more concepts I've never needed). You might be "assigned" a task, or perhaps you are the "owner". It's all so tainted by Agile that we have to speak this goofy ass language which makes us feel more sophisticated than the rest of the world which... does the same thing using common verbage.
Worst of all is these tools have barely any meaningful integration with source control hosting like GitHub or GitLab. Yes, they can do nifty things like show the title of the GitHub issue, but every place I've worked for forced me to ping pong between the PM software and GitHub/Lab and I always ended up having to manually sync things between the two. Or I would have to manually copy information between the PM software and whatever non-engineers were using, like Asana.
Like, I really don't care that badly about having to sync some things by hand, but it's a nuisance when the tool pretends to be advanced by shoving a bunch of information, terminology, and processes in my face. Give me a tool that will stay out of my way.
---
Oh, yes, the article.
> The thing I really like about this idea is that the user can organize their hierarchy however they like. They are not restricted to what the software defines as an “epic.”
Yep, exactly. It should get out of the way and not force organizations or individuals into hard and fast paradigms. Funny how we overuse abstractions in code but our project management tools are overly concrete.
> Want to create a sprint? Create a circle and reference other circles within it. Want to create an epic? Create a circle and reference other circles within it. Want to view your circle and its children as a kanban? It supports that. Want to move circles around, such as nesting them or unnesting them? It’s as easy as pressing “tab” or “shift+tab.”
Although obviously I'm not a fan of adding more neologisms, the way that circles work here definitely sounds appealing in terms of flexibility. In this case, it kind of makes sense since a circle doesn't necessarily have to represent anything in particular besides what the user wants it to be.
> I want a project management solution that:
> - Emphasizes team collaboration
> - Is able to scale with a company’s growth
> - A playground for teams to experiment and build tasks
> - Ability to capture OKRs (objectives and key results)
> - Task management
Most project management software claims to do most of those things. Not that you aren't right in wanting those things, but the possibilities circles have is the main selling point IMO.