[cpursley]

Isn't project management software a solved problem already?

Seems like all this effort on these type of pm systems could have been applied to some niche market that's still using custom MS Access systems built in the early 2000s.

[bhuga]

Project management is a market that defies solving.

Every company (and person!) has their own workflows and requirements, or there'd be no way for businesses to differentiate themselves on operational efficiency. It's possible to encode those workflows into very flexible systems like Jira, but as is usually the case, that comes at a large cost in design and ease of use.

This creates a market for thousands of small project management solutions, each a well-designed, slimmed down service, often equivalent to a particular customization of ClearCase or Asana but far easier to set up and use.

[alkonaut]

It might be solved somewhere but the problem is for each business to find what software solves it for them. I've been evaluating a switch from a mix of little tools and found no package yet that solves all our business needs. Example: we use four teams with staggered sprint times, so planning, burndowns should allow for that (multi team planning and scheduling on a single project). A lot of tools are out already at that point TFS is one tool with excellent multi-team scrum, but last time I checked TFS didn't even account for weekends in its burndowns. A bug/omission like that left unattended for several releases isn't encouraging. So were still searching.

[tonyarkles]

Not to criticize those who have worked on project management systems in the past, but I've found that most systems are generally pretty painful for me. Generally the project management "systems" that work best for me is something like a shared Evernote checklist or org-mode, but those aren't nearly as good for clients/teams to use.

One of the things that I've often encountered is a granularity/association problem: tasks often become either Omnibus tasks where there's a shitload of stuff jammed into a single task, or a spread out mishmash of related tasks that don't have very good linking between them.

A good example would be a web development feature. I'm going to do the backend, someone else is going to do the frontend. Those are two pretty distinct tasks, but there's a lot of shared communication there. And most PM systems I've used don't have a (good) way to link those together. Mostly in my experience, 3rd party tools end up getting used, with links to shared wiki/moqups/google docs/dropbox whatever.

If I need to have 7 tabs open (email, slack, trello, moqups, google docs...) to get all the information I need to figure out what I need to work on next, my PM system isn't serving me very well.

[Linnea]

I wouldn't say project management is really a solved problem, and definitely wouldn't claim that Matterhorn solves 100% of all problems with project management systems.

The biggest issue we had in our team was that some team members are just slowed down by having to use a project management tool and would much prefer to just have a written checklist on their desk, but obviously this causes a lot of issues when you're trying to keep track of what's been done and what hasn't. The planner was created to help circumvent this issue, when tickets are assigned to a user and planned for a certain date they become a checklist on that user's dashboard. This way we were able to let checklisters do their thing uninterrupted and still have their progress tracked on the board and the general product overview.

Tasks becoming either omnibus or overly fragmented is familiar to us too. Matterhorn has a feature grouping system that can help but it always comes down to how you use them. It might be an interesting problem to solve for the future.

[tonyarkles]

Heh, the written checklist is definitely something I can relate to! I'll probably give this a try, it seems like you've had some of the same issues I've had :)

[ProAm]

> Isn't project management software a solved problem already?

Not even remotely. By and large because you'll have technical and non-technical people using the same tool for projects that have multiple audiences. There will always be room for change and improvements, and people are always willing to spend money on those types of things. It's sort of a bottomless well of revenue for companies that create this type of software.

[tfigueroa]

You're completely correct, but when the software is just a band-aid for the fact that work is hard and planning it is harder - well, you can sell all kinds of band-aids.