Show HN: I am building a new Scrum Project Management App
gethappystack.com
gethappystack.com
Once again, best of luck!
I don't know how far this will go or if it'll be successful, But I gotta give it a go.
To be fair, they do not care about any specific individual developer. And I don't bother tracking individual dev performance. I track the overall delivery cadence.
Where I do care about individual developers is knowing how much they stay on-task. My teams vary from someone who will always do exactly what is outlined in the ticket, to people who second-guess and redesign the work (sometimes for the better, sometimes not), to people who go off the rails and design grand future visions that we then need to scale back to reality.
All of those people have value, but I need to manage their working style to the short-term business needs when planning upcoming work - sometimes I can let them fly free, sometimes I just need someone to put a freaking button on the screen and ship it.
So yes, it matters... micro-managing is pointless, but high level tracking helps set the correct pace of delivery.
It is more a power play by the "Management" rather than satisfying any actual need. While some amount of management and issue/time tracking is necessary the intense focus on the same by Agile/Scrum is useless and counter-productive.
If you're interested, sing up to be notified when I have the beta version ready. Hopefully in a month or two. If not, tell your friends.
Thank you Terry
I just wanted to see if there was interest. Looks like there is. That's awesome.
I'll spend some time this week adding more details to the page.
Can you say why? Kanban is literally the only thing I like about capital-A Agile. I doubt either of will convince the other to change our minds. But in the interest of helping you refine what you’re building and how you communicate it, articulating what you don’t want is valuable too.
I've been doing project management for a over a decade now and from my experience, and interviewing people, reading, I realized that people work best in lists. Top to bottom, most important tasks at the top, least important at the bottom. It helps us focus and get more done.
So that's the primary idea behind it.
You’re saying Kanban was designed to track inventory. I think that’s true but not completely accurate. It was designed to track work and inventory together.
> people work best in lists. Top to bottom, most important tasks at the top, least important at the bottom. It helps us focus and get more done.
I’m so confused! This is exactly what Kanban is supposed to be. It’s not supposed to be anything more than that, or less.
Where did the bad PM Jira you?
As a process for tracking work, it is lacking for a number of reasons. There is too much information on the board at any one time. It is too open, meaning, you can create as many columns as you need, which leads to unnecessary complexity.
Finally, the Kanban system works well for moving physical items (completed items) from one station to next. It is not used for changing states of items. We use it to change state on incomplete tasks (i.e from Blocked to Todo to Inprogress), which not what Kanban is for.
I think sprints enforced by the interface is critical to keep management on track. The companies I worked at which used Asana, Trello, or free-form task lists were a mess. It was maddening not having a single schedule.