Ask HN: How do you deal with so many project management systems? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you deal with so many project management systems?

101 pointsdpcan52 comments

I deal with a lot of clients, many of them have their own internal systems and teams, and they add me in to their projects.

I've noticed that now my life consists of having multiple Basecamp, Trello and Asana projects all open in different tabs at the same time. Then they want me chatting in Skype, or they text and email. And I have to remote with Join.me, Zoho, GotoMeeting.

No longer are project management systems keeping me organized, it's turned into a mess.

Do you deal with this too? Are there any solutions out there that can interface with all these major systems at once?

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Don't treat your customers' project management systems as your own organization tools.

Instead, treat them as deliverables and manage your own organization elsewhere.

+1 on this. What the poster describes is a symptom, not the real problem. The real problem is multiple folks all expecting them to be as available as a little icon on the screen. Perhaps even to be able to control their actions by manipulating a tool.

You can't do that, and it's not because they're all using separate systems. It just doesn't scale. (Insert long discussion here about multi-tasking, competing business interests, cost-of-delay, and so on)

yep, this exactly. if my client has another PM system, that doesn't mean I have to use it. Sure, I might interface with it but that is the cost of being a consultant having to work with many different PM systems, apps, etc.

One of the main reasons why consultants who get paid so much $$ is because they are so flexible. Yes, they can program in many languages, but they also know multiple operating systems, PM systems, and have the ability to communicate across multiple channels. The real $$ comes when you can do it all in English, Chinese and Spanish :)

We've done this before, but it becomes in and of itself.

I've found the same applies to corporate organization tools. I manage my tasks separately with "update JIRA" being one of those tasks.

I hope you at least leave notes about what you do. Few things are more infuriating than seeing a complex task assigned to someone, and the next entry is "Solved." and the ticket closed. Great that the problem was solved, but the corporate organization tool exists to make solution information more available to others with the same problem.

In a way, ticket systems are another type of documentation, along with man pages and KB articles and persistent chat (like Slack).

Well he does, in his own systems. Not in yours. Is my guess.

Sure, though adding in note is a kind of signaling -- a social mechanism that helps teams come together. If someone is working as a contractor, is relatively isolated from the team, then there probably won't be a need or even a desire for the contractor to add notes to the client's management system, for the sake of signaling to the in-house development team. On the other hand, some sort of notes tend to make many non-technical clients feel better and be on top of things. (And some people are confused by signaling; a good communicator would be able to suss that out).

Good point. I do use Trello for all my internal stuff, then checklists inside my cards for each project. But then I find I forget to update my checklists in my Clients' project management tools :( I guess that's just a personal problem I need to figure out though.

EDIT 2: Updated the wrong comment.

When I have that situation, I use IFTTT to auto-create a Trello card to update their stuff on whatever day.

It's not elegant but it means that I can use the tools that are the most relevant and ignore everything else in the meantime.

We actually ran into the exact same problem while juggling multiple projects and ended up creating Taco - https://tacoapp.com. Taco aggregates your Basecamp, Trello, Asana and 35+ other services into a single screen so you can prioritize your day across multiple services. Works especially well with a new tab Chrome extension.

Haven't found the best way to consolidate applications for real time services. Although, I've found that it hasn't been too difficult to get people to hop on the Slack train. I've been in the same problem with video chat - Google Hangouts, Facetime, GoToMeeting, Skype, etc. Would love to hear what other people use.

That's awesome! I've been needing this type of tool for a while - will definitely give it a whirl.

Great! Would love to hear what you think!

I don't use it, but have you tried out Sameroom [1] for real-time chat? They seem pleasant enough. No idea what to do for video chat, though.

[1]: https://sameroom.io

This is great, thanks for the link!

A similar one but as a native client app: http://meetfranz.com/

Yea, this looks interesting. We've managed an internal sprint board with JIRA and treated the customer-facing task tracking systems as inputs and outputs of our sprints.

It'd definitely be nice to replace our internal system with something that was lighter-weight than JIRA and had integrations (bidirectionally) with the customer-facing task tracking systems. I'll run this by the team and we may give it a try.

One question: I don't see pricing or a paid version anywhere on the site. What's the business model for this product?

Great to hear, I actually use Taco as a lightweight JIRA UI myself (along with GitHub Issues, a few Wunderlist lists, and starred GMail emails).

Response on pricing above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565896

I'm really starting to think a startup that solves Jira's UI/UX problems would work.

Wow, this is exactly what I've been looking for. I can't wait to give it a spin.

Just some feedback - it drives me nuts when services aren't clear what their pricing is. If it's free, fine. If it's paid, fine. If it's free now but you plan on charging later for premium features, fine. But IMO you have to be upfront about it.

There's nothing on the homepage, no pricing page, nothing. It makes me nervous to sign up without this information.

This, a million times over.

I went looking... it's not on the site, not in the knowledge base, not on the blog.

There is absolutely no pricing information.

Does Taco not charge anyone? If you do charge, give me a ballpark, a range even... it doesn't matter so long as you give it.

Am I signing up for something without that info? Er... no.

Taco is free for now, but we expect and hope to charge $5-$10/month at some point - cheap enough be a fantastic value for anyone who uses it even occasionally, but also not a free service that you rightly don't want. We're still figuring out when we should flip the switch but in the meantime, you are right, we need to do a better job of explaining possible future pricing.

So the plan is to generate an initial spike in demand from a group of people marginally interested in something they can get for free, then alienate your core users, who would have been happy to pay from the outset, by introducing a fee, but only once the service is sufficiently overburdened supporting free users ? Well they say any plan is better than no plan... but....

Turn this upside down now, think about 100 users paying $50 a month for something they depend on, I bill $100/hr, if you can save me an hour a month I'm winning, once you have $5000 a month every month think about the next 100, keep going, sounds like your product has a use, don't make the free mistake, it's been highlighted here many times, good luck!

+1 on this... I'd say do a 30-day trial period, then around day 25 ask for billing information... If you have tracking/analytics in place you know how many users are returning once signing up, and you have a better indication of conversion after use.

If you're going to have a free tier, I'd say limit it to N service integrations (3-5), but definitely make your core users paying close to the start.

If I had a need for something like this day to day, I'd definitely pay... Actually, I'd suffer for a while, then try it, then suffer again, then pay... but that's me and I'm kind of cheap/frugal. Most people will start paying once they see and feel the value.

Also, it's much easier to field requests from a few hundred paying users than thousands of non-paying ones. It's very hard to do conversion from free after the fact... many businesses have failed, burned, burned out, and left their best (paying) users in a lurch following this model.

+1 for all that although I'd be tempted to get the billing info on sign up and offer a 'throwaway' good deal for the uncertain, so, say $50 a month, or try 10 days for $3

You're absolutely right. Right now, there is none, which sucks. As Aral Balkan says well and as I'm sure you know, free is a lie [1]. People should pay for services that they use, and services which get used should be paid. We'll get there. But to answer questions about pricing, it's free until we are comfortable enough to charge.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldhHkVjLe7A

Put that on your homepage then!

Any plans to add redbooth.com?

We'll gladly consider adding Redbooth. Shoot us an email at support@tacoapp.com. We'd love to hear how you are using it.

Hmmmm.... I'd be much more likely to take the time to sign up to use this thing if there were a handful of screenshots showing what it's like to use.

Taco looks pretty slick, I'm definitely checking that out, thank you!

Put a slack bot interface in front of this and I will love you forever.

Actually, we are in the works of releasing a Slack connector. Star a message or DM in Slack and see it as a task in Taco. Taco only asks for and obtains access to your starred messages (on https://api.slack.com/docs/oauth-scopes, "stars:list" and "stars:remove"), not all archives. Shoot us an email at support@tacoapp.com if you'd like to help us test it out!

Trying it out myself. One suggestion for your Chrome App - don't ask for permission to gibberishasdfasdf.cloudfront.com - that stuff is easy to whitelabel. Permissions scare users, especially when there is gibberish.

A big text file, with a heading for each day.

In go tasks, troubleshooting attempts, outcomes, links, etc. Then I copy+paste into github issues, commit messages, and wiki articles as needed (part of my deliverables, as @LeifCarrotson puts it).

* No vendor lock-in, no lag, no migration issues.

* Never have duplicate typing because of copy+paste.

* Get a daily history of your work going back into time in a light, portable, ubiquitous format.

* Recover from accidentally hitting the back button while writing a Jira ticket.

* Be able to precisely answer "What did you work on last week" (or last Monday when you logged out of VPN, or anything else)

I have to move the text from my file into the tracking tool(s), and that could be a downside. But I like having a layer of translation there. It lets me select and rephrase snippets that will communicate best in each environment.

Example: https://gist.github.com/SimplGy/a516c54a81fb24f807f9512fed82...

I've been doing this in Evernote for years -- one note for each month, and now I've switched to Quiver which provides a somewhat better experience.

Quiver looks really interesting, thanks for sharing. I love that you can export as plain text or markdown. The idea that this would count as "no vendor lock in" to me hinges on exactly how the text export works -- when exported, can I go back to a text-only experience pretty easily, or will I have 1000s of separate text files for each "cell". Sort of a tangent, but hey.

That's not easy to answer. You need them but you need to limit them as well. Also you have to be cautious of ADD coworkers who introduce new tools every week, 'hey look I found a new Trello integration, ...'

Main rule: avoid anything synchronous as much as possible such a chat, Slack, group chat, Skype, just turn that shit off; if someone wants to catch you he will call you on the phone

You need some project management tool for progress tracking and for enabling good specs, but only one; so get either Trello or Asana but not both; though can have have both for different dept.s and task types

Juggling systems is goofy but as long as they're web based it's easy, go old school

+customer data folder ++customer name > links to trello,slack go here +++project name > links to trello etc. go here

then I have a todo.md or todo.txt using imdone-atom with snippits, gives you a text based kanban, you can open project folders with atom --add c:\customers\abc\project1 and alt-t for tasks

also alt-j is journal where you can try to kanban all customers if you're ocd

documentation should not go in a ticket system, it should go in a wiki

my fav is a combo of integrated apps like trello/slack, jira/confluence, github/gitter

tasks are todo/doing/done and done includes closing their ticket system and updating their wiki or whatever they're using like a wiki

1. As others have said, don't treat the tools provided by your clients as "organizational tools", treat the communication via those tools as a part of the deliverable they are paying for. If they have a convoluted system, ensure you are paid accordingly if it will take you a long time to use it the way they are asking.

2. Use Browser Profiles, and have a differently named user for each client, with different default tabs and authentication states. When you need to work on "Client A", simply click your name in the top-right of Chrome, select "Client A", and a new window will open with all of your important tabs open.

3. Documentation isn't just for code! For each client, keep a dossier of your contacts at the organization, their preferred method of contact, etc. This document can also act as "usage notes" for their internal or provided systems. It's helpful to have a document like this be the default opened tab when hopping into the Browser Profile for a specific client.

We face this problem as well. We are working across multiple systems and sometimes unable to take advantage of the various triggers/reports etc we had setup in our own JIRA, which meant we had to work harder to deliver to the same standard.

So, we developed a robo-advisor to deal with it called stratejos (http://stratejos.com). stratejos takes care of house keeping (like making sure the tools are being used as expected) and provides project analytics on top of this. We're currently in beta, would love to hear the problems people are having so we can solve them.

With the skype/chatting/etc this is probably something you just have to deal with, as someone else said, its part of being a consultant.

This isn't a new problem. I used to have to enter my time in 3 places. Once for the client's corporate system, once for the project-based system, and once for my company's system. As much as we like innovation, this is part of the case for standardization. :-)

The mental model I follow is:

1 - Figure out if you can fight it. If it's a fight you can win, push to standardize. If it's one you can't, don't waste your time.

2 - If you don't fight it, figure out which have data that is really being used, and which people are just going through the motions. For the data that's being used, keep it current and think through the input. For data that's not, don't kill yourself.

3 - Always have your own #s so that you can answer what's really going on.

One suggestion, and I'm not how hard it is to setup a new account with a real phone number, or moving the number. But setup Google Voice, and use hangouts to manage your text messages. You'll be able to run hangouts on your desktop, and type your text messages, not to mention copy/paste wherever they are needed.

I find that it's really nice to be able to handle texts while I'm working directly on my computer, or wherever I am. Does phone calls as well, if you're using a headset with a mic. Hangouts also does video calls and screen sharing, but nobody else seems to use it much. I actually like it a lot, even though the video quality leaves a lot to be desired.

Edit: been a happy user since it was Grand Central, before the Google buyout.

I feel your pain. A few weeks ago I was even asked to track my time in a clients system. First thought was "but I send you invoices with my time in them."

Second thought was, "why don't you pay your staff to enter time from my invoices?"

Third thought was "I'll have to bill you a stupid hourly rate to enter my time in your system."

Right now I'm stuck at the third thought and they've agreed, but I haven't started doing it yet and don't want to. Their systems are their systems and mine are mine.

I sympathize, but honestly, the fourth thought - that you don't want to do the data entry the client has agreed to pay you for - is a bad thought that you need to evict from your brain ASAP. You should want to do it. It's a good deal - you get paid the same rate for easy work that you would get paid for hard work. We technologists sometimes get bad thoughts in our heads that are variants of the idea that we have the power and responsibility to optimise the entire universe, but in reality of course we have no such thing, and we need to get rid of those thoughts and draw appropriate boundaries.

You're right. I think it's aa timing thing. In June-August or December I'd be happy to get to invoice for simple admin work. But I seem to be slammed Jan-May every year (lots of weekend work, business travel) so it just seems excessive right now.

You are also correct that we want to optimize everything. Sigh.

Have you considered a personal assistant for it?

If the output would be the same whether it was done by you or someone else... well, why not explore not doing it yourself?

I'm curious whether big companies like Google or Facebook have a standard project management process or software used by all teams. I work at Mozilla and every team is doing their own thing, which can make collaboration difficult. We have Bugzilla bugs, GitHub issues, wikis, Mana (Confluence's wiki), Google Docs and spreadsheets, Trello, Smartsheets, Aha, and JIRA. Even when people agree there is a problem, no team wants to be the one to change their process.. :)

One thing about Project Management that had always struck me why is this space so fragmented and why there is no clear winner? You can create a project management tool now with a new perspective and I am sure you will have customers for it.

My hunch suggests that there will be soon a Project Management tool that has growth trajectory similar to "Slack" or who knows it might be "Slack" itself.

Consider using a different user per account - the gain having a dedicated chrome / safari password. Auxiliary gain, this will keep you more focused on one client at a time.

Google Docs was honestly the best system I have used to date. Skim the others. Put the important stuff from them in a Google doc. Important stuff at the top (everything else will naturally fall into less important). Highlight extra things as you see the need. No farting about having to learn yet another system that doesn't quite meet your needs.

(Might be worth adding that all the companies I have worked at for the last few years were under resourced).

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