NYCPHP Meetup

[Tim Lieberman]

On Dec 14, 2008, at 11:45 PM, Ajai Khattri wrote:

> On Sun, 14 Dec 2008, Matt Juszczak wrote:
>
>> "state-of-the-art project management software which will include  
>> automated
>> project scheduling, issue management, risk management, resource  
>> management
>> and other tools; skills training for project managers; consistent  
>> project
>> management methodologies, and Proactive communication of project  
>> and task
>> status."
>
> And you forgot the kitchen sink :-)
>
> I think Ive spent years looking for a good open source solution and  
> Ive
> never found anything close. (Maybe we should write one? :-)
>
> As far as commercial solutions go, right now we're using FogBugz but
> Mingle looks pretty good too.

FogBugz is nice for what it does.  The killer feature is email  
integration, IMO.  Mantis (mantisbt.org) is a nice (PHP) open-source  
issue-tracker that's pretty flexible as far as use cases go.

Project Management is bigger than just issue-tracking.

There's the school of thought that says "Project Management is about  
Communication (and everything else is a waste of time)" -- mostly  
championed by the 37signals guys (their product, basecamp (http://www.basecamphq.com 
), is actually pretty useful for a small-ish kind of enterprise.  (At  
least) one of their founders, Jason Fried, is pretty outspoken about  
the philosophy.  I went to an event while I was out in Denver where he  
pontificated about that sort of stuff for a long time.  I don't agree  
with a lot of what he says, but it's still thought-provoking.  There's  
a low-fi recording of the talk and some Q/A here:

<http://blog.electricmindcontrol.net/2008/08/jason-fried-of-37signals-new-denver-ad-club-audio-notes/ 
 >

The highlight for me was when he said he'd run his company into the  
ground before including GANTT charts as a feature, no matter how many  
people ask for it. So if there's an interest in taking a step back,  
you might want to pass that around as food for thought.