[onion2k]

No matter how good your JIRA-alternative is, persuading people to manage a project in a different way is exceptionally hard, and has very little to do with your tech. Project Management is seen as a science, and people don't like to deviate from known methodologies. My startup was in this space (managing projects, with a focus on requirements and change), and we failed because we underestimated how hard it would be to get customers to even try a different approach.

[dragonwriter]

> Project Management is seen as a science, and people don't like to deviate from known methodologies.

It's treated more as a set of religious rituals justified by received wisdom (which, to be fair, gives even less flexibility for change than if it were viewed as a science, in which case practices would be based on systematically gathered evidence and change in response to new evidence, rather than changing mostly when people indoctrinated in a different tradition come to power in an organization.)

[onion2k]

Actually yes, that does seem to be a more appropriate analogy. A lot of the time people follow a system without testing whether or not it's working.