Ask HN: What project management tool do you love?
What tools would you suggest for a small team of 5 or 6 devs and designers?
I had been running my company of 5 employees for several years and never was able to get overview of projects and good and transparent feedback from the makers. This led me to create a new way to work that I am now turning into a method and an app.
The foundation of the method is 1) Leave the makers alone so they can be as much as possible in flow 2) Inform the Managers, honestly and transparent so they have total overview and sleep better. 3) Commit and be acountable to team members, manager and customers about what you will do during the week to improve internal motivation 4) Learn from mistakes, discuss how to learn from failures and how you can behave differently to prevent making the same mistakes.
Read more on http://timeblock.com and sign up for the newsletter to get the method in a three day course.
Disclosure: I work at ZenHub - the favourite feedback I get is how much it cuts down on context switching between where developers want to live - GitHub, and where Project Managers want to live Jira/Trello/etc, as everyone can work directly from GitHub Issues.
And pens (of course, lots of colours) and other things to stick to them, like Lego bricks with sticky bottoms (workflow/queues), and post-it notes (that are able to stick to whiteboards, a lot of post-its can't), and a countdown timer for your huddles so they don't take that little bit too long, and multiple small screens stuck there too if you have workflow or queues.
And a webcam permanently on if you have a remote employee/partner 'visit' the office on-demand but don't record them because they're likely working from home and they'd like their home privacy.
All of these, and more, are cheap, simple, tactile, and can be mixed around until you find something that fits.
We've been using it for about a month, and looks like it's exactly what we need. Previously we used JIRA, but it would be more precisely to say we made several approaches to start using JIRA, and every time after sing it for 1-2 weeks we slowly ceased. It looked too heavy for our small company and our environment, no one wanted to deal with it.
Now with Breeze.pm we have project dashboards, some integrations with HipChat, Github, Slack. Notifications, calendar, groups of projects, search and filters - and a nice and responsive UI attached. We also like the developer of Breeze who is open for questions and suggestions.
They integrate with each other very well, and you can even plug in github to PivotalTracker and Flowdock to make everything seamless.
I think they are free for up to 5 people as well.
Asana --> https://asana.com/
Also note worthy is Evernote.
Be aware, Asana is pricey, but they have a special offer for startups.
For my personal projects, I generally go with Trello.
If your team is heavy tech, then go JIRA, all other, I would say asana. Personal use, trello.
Pretty good at Scrum, Kanban is in progress (some features already there and a first delivery in June).
Net benefit: you get one tool for project management, source control and tracking (bug, todo, etc) in one central place with easy administration. Plus, it's fully open source!
Note: I'm part of the dev team.