A fail journey w/ five project managment products
The bitflip team has tried many project management products over the years. I'm a project lead on simultaneous projects and I have searched in vain for the silver bullet. Some online products reviewed here may have improved since we tried them. In this post I'll review the products we didn't pick at the the time and why. There are three products that we use on a daily basis and they will be detailed in a future post. I hope this helps other small design shops.
#1 Too many features too many headaches
Myintervals.com or Intervals is not necessarily a bad project management tool. However it is overkill for our needs. It felt bloated when we tried it. I think the product aims to be a complete solution for medium to large organizations but bitflip is a small firm with a 3-5 person team expanding and contracting. So I need to be able delegate quickly and efficiently. The learning curve with Intervals led to near zero buy-in from staff. Usability proved to be problematic with too many features available and not intuitive. We needed something that would be adopted quickly for a transient staff. Intervals was not it.
#2 Installation Persperation
ActiveCollab offers customization which helped to reduce the "bloatedness" effect. It is meant to be installed on your own server. The customization and tweaking is great. The problem is installing it. We spent a significant amount of time customizing and tweaking and then we ran into installation issues. Once installed and customized the product worked ok however we experienced user permission issues. We needed more plug-ins requiring more installation and upgrading. Overall it was a frustrating and time sucking adventure.
#3 Customization Craziness
Google sites meets two of the three criteria.
- Web-based and no installation
- Easily tweaked and customized
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Usability for efficient project management
Complete customization means a lot of work. Google sites offer templates created by others or create your own. After searching through hundreds of template I found a few project management templates. The templates didn't have everything I needed but I thought I could customize with add-ons. The usability of the add-ons and the overall clunkiness of the sites again caused usability issues. It's not easy to add people to projects. Google docs opened up another permission-based can of worms that wasn't worth the time to overcome.
#4 Think outside the Box
We didn't give Box.net a fair shake because it is similar Dropbox which w use Dropbox on a regular basis. I couldn't see paying for two similar tools. Dropbox will be covered in depth in my next post. Box.net is worth a look though. It has some great features that Dropbox is lacking including commenting, discussion logs and task management. Our Dropbox comfort level decided the issue.
#5 An Also Ran
We didn't give sufficient time to Basecamp because the price point didn't work for us. Starting at $50/month Basecamp needs to be awesome at everything. As a pure project managment tool for larger teams, Basecamp may be a good solution but Dropbox offers more file storage space at 50GB for $99 per year. The beginning plan for Basecamp is 15GB. I wouldn't recommend Basecamp for bookkeeping or invoicing however It does interface seamlessly with Freshbooks which is another product we use regularly. Basecamp was a little bloated for our needs.
Do your own project management fail story?
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