[eksemplar]

A tool for managing software development that doesn’t suck. Especially if your developers are doing a lot of small projects, that while too small to have their own sprint or their own kanbanboard are too big to fit into a single card on Trello.

Possibly something that mixes business and process models into it, but again, something simple where you attach a single bpmn drawing and maybe an architectural sketch to the process. Add time management, deadlines and maybe a tie in to the web services of an ESDH system and it might even work for task management in case working.

Everything is build for theoretical approaches. Like we do SCRUM, but really, we’re doing scrumish things. We have an odd schedule, we work on multiple projects at once, depending on what resources are available and what has higher priority, sometimes something breaks and then we’re all doing operations rather than development, sometimes the mayor has a direct request and so on. I think we’ve tried all the tools from atlassian to trello and nothing fits, it’s all too textbook for a messy place like ours and often I think we should go back to postits and a fucking excel schedule but I really don’t want to ever print an excel sheet ever again.

Interestingly I do a lot of networking with other managers in the public set for, and everyone had this problem, not just in digitization. There isn’t a single efficient tool for managing your workforce in the public sector.

There are excellent tools, don’t get me wrong, but we can’t have our workers spend hours on them because we can’t sell those hours to anyone.

[jakebrereton]

What you're saying here really resonates, and it's something that we, at Atlassian, have heard from many of our users. The Jira team has been hard at work on a brand new project type that aims to give teams running "scrumish" the perfect opportunity to build a board and workflow that will truly fit any style of work (even work with an odd schedule, multiple projects at once, and that requires a mixture between operations and dev!).

We've gotten a lot of feedback that often times the strict structures of scrum and kanban are overly burdensome, yet teams still want and need some basic guardrails (as well as the ability to modify their processes on the fly). Our Product team is still testing and iterating on this new project type quite a bit, and if you're up for it, we'd love to give you an early demo and get your honest thoughts and feedback.

If you're interested, please shoot me an email and we'll find some time for a demo: [e-mail]

Jake

Jira PMM @ Atlassian

[Joeri]

There’s a fundamental divide that most of these tools struggle with which causes the sucky behavior: you plan work at the team level but you manage scope at the project level. If you don’t have a clear correspondence between teams and projects (a team owns a project and does all the work), it will be hard to manage in all of these tools, because you’re always missing out on half the story. The process packaging like scrum or kanban merely obfuscates the fact that the team/project mismatch creates the confusion.

[bojo]

Been searching for something like this for awhile now. We have a small team that gets distributed across a handful of projects, but trying to find a good way to manage that has been a chore.

Originally we used JIRA, but it was complete overkill. We've settled on making adhoc GitHub Project kanbans and very creative use of the labels, and so far it's been ok, but not perfect.

The other thing we have to do is time tracking for specific tasks depending on the project/client, which has us going over to ConnectWise (the primary part of our company is an MSP), which is just terrible.

The final problem is tying all of the documentation together. The MSP side of the company uses ITGlue, but it's not enough for everything we do as developers. Confluence was actually nice for that, but since we've left Atlassian we're just tracking stuff using a doc folder attached to the project source itself.

[beckler]

I would look at clubhouse.io, or maybe cushionapp.com?

I've never used cushion, but I like clubhouse a lot.