Project Management Systems Suck at Managing Projects

Wherein I pitch for IRC/Slack

A Plethora of Mediocrity

There are way too many of project management systems. Of course, there are the well known ones: Base Camp, Trello, JIRA are the big three in my mind.

But there’s a long tail out there: Ganttic, Team Week, Hub Planner, Flow, Teamgrid, netsuite, ResourceGuru, Harvest Forecast, Zoho projects, Wrike, Liquidplanner, Odoo. The list goes on forever.

And everyone has their own opinion on which one is the best, of course.

Through it all, one thing became clear to me; these companies all more or less sell a lie: “Use our system and you won’t ever have to think about managing tasks again.”

For a long time, I believed some of this lie. I wouldn’t have stated it that way. But I acted like it.

Project Management Systems don’t help you manage a project

Project management systems don’t really help you manage a project. They help you—very vaguely—know what to do next when everything is going according to plan. And they give you some idea of what happened in the past on the team around tasks.

They completely fall over when even an inch off the Happy Path.

Making software is hard enough by itself with yourself, but a group of people makes it harder and multiple teams completely mess with them. Getting a 12 cats headed in the same direction is often easier than 3 people.

The reason is usually pretty simple: coordination around tasks is mainly a communication problem. Work happens inside of a chaotic environment—not an ideal one. People are out sick. The tasks take too long. The test environment was down. The laptop breaks. So many things can go wrong.

And you keep track of all that with communication.

Unfortunately, most PM systems straight up ignore this problem. They’re just bags of tasks. Some of them make a paltry attempt at feeds or daily reports. But that doesn’t help you right now know about what’s going on.

Resurrect the Chat room

At my work, we use Slack to work around this problem. (You could use HipChat, but I feel like it has a long way to go still.) You could also run an IRC channel instead.

It gives you that magical “hanging around the water cooler” feel by segmenting conversations into channels. Segment by team or by project or product, and you’ll find suddenly people know more what’s going on.

But that’s just the beginning of the magic of chatrooms. Once you plug in Jenkins and Github and XYZ tool, so that you can see when a commit is made or when a build fails, the various chat rooms transform into this thing that gives you a meaningful look into a project’s now.

Don’t get me wrong. You still need the project management system for the traceability of pieces of work. But honestly, that’s mostly for having an idea of what’s been done over time, a life saver in what-the-crap-happened situations. And if you have them tied into a billing or time tracking system, then it becomes an operational efficiency thing.

But on the whole, PM systems suck at the one thing they should be doing: allowing a project to be managed for right now.