Project management comes in various guises. Throughout my freelance and perm-ilance career I’ve worked for central government in Prince2 environments, advertising agencies with XP environments, cowboy coding environments, no environment at all with the code stored on various people’s desktops and lastly Agile environments, which seem to be the flavour du jour.
With all of these methodologies comes various different tools to help you get the job done, from MS project & MS excel, Google spreadsheets & docs, adobe connect, sourceForge (resultsSpace2 from Sapient), Jira, BaseCamp, fogzBugs, and most recently Mingle, a product of the company Thoughtworks. These are all products that do pretty much the same things.
They all have their merits and scalability, but I was thinking of what the next generation of project management tool and it strikes me that these key features will be required (in brackets is the software that already does this):
- agile project management wall (Mingle) (- with a UI that makes it more like a mind map),
- IRC style chat rooms (Mingle)
- Video conferencing & Skype facilities (unknown as to who does this currently)
- Generic upload capabilities of unlimited size (BaseCamp, mailbigfile etc.)
- ScreenCasting abilities (Fog creek co-pilot, adobe connect, jing)
- Time estimation tools (fogzbugs)
- SVN repository (Sourceforge)
- bug/task tracking (Jira, fogzbugs, mingle)
- inline text editing (squizz CMS)
- packaged Audit trail output(dump)
- track changes style document/image commenting (MS word)
- visual screen capture and comment - for bug tracking (Fogzbugz)
Anyone who can put these all into one nicely wrapped up box will come out on top (for the time being) and be able to sell their wares to all of the big agencies, IT consultancies and small players. Having all of these at your fingertips will significantly help to improve the painful process of client centric agile software development.
Also one major feature will be online/offline syncronisation whether using adobe air, wpf or google gears it is up to the vendor.
Most importantly in this world of GDD (global distributed delivery) and 24 hour timezones and economic crisis style proportions, there is one person who will definitely need it - moi.
I’ve just found a comprehensive run down of most web 2.0 project management apps out there for web projects:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/11/13/15-useful-project-management-tools/
trust me to be late into the game… again.
