Why have project management software that doesn’t complete the tasks of your project for you?

Building project management/collaboration software that allows users to complete the tasks within the software interface. I want to document my creation of this. Hopefully it will succeed, but I want to document all the pitfalls as well as the victories. (NOTE: It is not currently an open source project as I amcreating this for the use of my employer. If at some point they would like to open source it, I would be happy to.)

“Oh no, not another project management or collaboration tool that’s going to promise efficiency and deliver extra work” — says everyone when I mention that I’m building a tool to create workflow efficiencies.

Initially I just wanted to do it for my own use -mainly just to keep track of the projects that get thrown my way on a nearly daily basis. Of course the projects usually aren’t a “one and done” problems they are usually multilayered issues that require me to break the problem into various components and solve each one individually while maintaining the integrity of the “whole”. So I needed to track the component parts as well.

I also collaborate with a graphic designer, journalists, conference producers and a host of other people — hence the collaboration aspect.

Just on technical terms I’m writing this software in PHP with a MySQL DB — in other words a LAMP stack. So far I don’t need anything more sophisticated as this is really just a web application.

My progress so far simply allows me to add projects with a description and basic information about due dates, project description and team members I need to collaborate with. (I just started today).

The whole goal though now is to create an interface where tasks can be completed without having to leave the software and the projects will be automatically updated — which is the thing that kills all project management software in my view — having to update everything manually. It’s why SalesForce sucks (from the perspective of someone who spent 15 years in sales — me), it’s why everything like that sucks.

I don’t want to solve a problem and then go to another piece software to say I solved the problem. Making sure, of course, my solution fits into whatever predetermined fields have been created.

My MVP for this will simply be a way for tracking projects and the associated tasks. So no matter what it won’t be a total loss even if my dream just turns out to be delusion.