[Jtsummers]

I've not done this collaboratively with others, but do something like this myself with org-mode (for just this one thing adopting emacs and org-mode may be overkill, but it supports this well at least for individual work). org-mode lets you setup your tasks and use nested tasks with multiple states that you can cycle through. Default is just no state, TODO, or DONE.

  * Projects
  ** TODO Integration [2/3]
  *** DONE Task 1       :bob:
  Write out some details and notes
  *** DONE Task 2       :alice:
  More details and notes
  *** TODO Task 3 [2/3] :bob:alice:
    - [x] AWS
    - [x] GCP
    - [ ] Azure

You can add tags (may be how you indicate someone is assigned), priorities, and other metadata to contents in org-mode which can help. If it's a small team, you can have ownership of a task be claimed by using NAME as one of the states where NAME would be ALICE or BOB, and other people on the team. That doesn't help if a task is shared though, so tags may be better for that.

The main thing missing from this, though the hierarchical structure somewhat helps, is with dependencies. org-mode can enforce linearity, that is that tasks 1 through 3 above are done in that specific order. It can also ensure that a parent task isn't marked done until all its children are done. But tasks across dependencies or more complex dependencies are not baked-in. [0] is something I've found, but not used, that would address this.

org-mode also has the agenda, so if you add dates (like deadlines or scheduled starts) it can help you keep specific activities on track. Say you need that Azure support finished by a particular date, you can add that information to this document. The deadline will appear in the agenda and help people prioritize the work.

And it has some pretty rich filtering available so you can see only what you care about at the moment, and of course it's plain text so grep works along with the regular search features in emacs.

[0] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-depend.html