5 Great Tools That Didn’t Work Out — Software Project Management
Over the years we have tried many things at KredX to manage estimates and the delivery of tech and product projects. We tried some common tools and some not-so-common-ones, and still, our search continues.
Requirements
We are a small team of engineers and PMs — about 20–25 people in all. And we just have a short ask from the project management tool:
- Super-easy to enter tasks (including future, ad hoc and current tasks) — It should take less than 5 seconds to enter a task, or better still, to somehow get that input automagically.
- Super-fast to add and update attributes — owner, projected delivery date, which project is it a part of, status, time estimate and actual completion date should be a non-thought to do.
- Cost under $7 per user per month (more useful than Slack? — prove it).
- **Reports** available for all users to show what was estimated, what was delivered, the reason for the difference, and improvements over time.
- Design to want to use it.
There are a few other good-to-have things like ticket tracker for external teams, dependency management, etc. but that can be skipped for now. So that’s it, nothing fancy.
Tools and trials
We have already tried many tools for this purpose, using each for at least 4 months before calling it quits on the tool. Here is our experience so far:
1. Asana [Nov 2016 — March 2017]
Asana was the hot tool a couple of years ago for project management and we dove right in. A lot might have changed by now, I assume, but at that time it seemed overly complex (at least 4–5 clicks and form entries) to add tasks, figure out statuses of a project quickly, and the lack of reports for feedback and improvement was a downer.
2. Google Sheets + Github Issues + Trello + YouTrack [March 2017 — September 2017]
Post Asana, we went into a discovery phase with each engineer/PM championing their preferred tool. We had long debates about which tool is better, building different workflows for the different tools, but never felt like we had found “The One”.
3. Jira [September 2017 — August 2018]
Then we found an ambassador for Jira who was willing to take up the ownership of getting everyone to use it and make sure that all the entries were properly tagged, and new users were set up properly. It worked to a certain extent, but then we finally gave up because
- Even after a few months, the team depended on the ambassador to keep the tool working fine
- It had become a bit expensive
- It was still difficult to input data to create tasks
- A dearth of reporting
4. Monday.com [August 2018 — March 2019]
Then someone in the team suggested this new tool and we thought, sure why not! It was very responsive, and allowed us to customize it exactly the way we wanted…well…to a certain extent. We started to see limitations with all the related data being required to be at the same place which caused the pages to slow down, and reporting not being available, as mentioned in Requirement #4.
5. Airtable [March 2019 — Present]
Which brings us to the current solution - a spreadsheet with foreign keys. Similar to Monday.com — we customized it substantially to work for our team, added a bunch of formulae, pointers and color-coding to make it easier to digest. It is a hacky approach but more or less works for us. For reports, we just download the CSV and use Excel for the charting. Default options would save a lot of data entry.
I feel very confident that we didn’t use these tools properly as they were supposed to be used. After all, everyone else seems to be going about project management just fine. That is what I thought until I spoke to a few tech and product leaders and realized many have a similar story like ours to share. Many teams have figured it out, while others still continue to search.
Got thoughts on this subject? Please do share your journey (and destination) in comments, or on your blog and post a link here.
