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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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 :)

+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)

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

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