It continues to surprise me just how many companies – especially smaller agencies – function without any kind of project management software in place. Often, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and email messages provide the standard means to “manage” tasks and ongoing issues despite how many inexpensive and intuitive alternatives are on the market.

I’m going to try to make the case here that every company – even one with as few as 2 people – should be using project management software. Below are the three major reasons people usually give as to why they don’t have any such system in place:

1. “Our current way of doing things is just fine”
   I would invite anyone who’s thinking this way to simply try a project management or issue tracking system for one week. There will almost certainly be a marked improvement in productivity and a reduction in stress for everyone involved in the project.
2. “It’s too expensive”
   While it’s true that some platforms have hefty licensing fees, there are plenty of cost-effective and even free alternatives to the more expensive products. BaseCamp, one of the products I discuss below, has pricing as low as $24 per month. We use a free product called Redmine (also discussed below), but it does take some tech know-how to get it set up.
3. “It’s too hard to learn”
   While it’s true that there is a learning curve for any new process or software, some of these products  are surprisingly intuitive right out of the box. The gains in productivity will vastly outweigh time lost in the learning process, not to mention that fear of new things is never a good reason to stick with the status quo.

Here’s a quick look at three products I’ve personally worked with. You can find a comprehensive comparison of project management software on Wikipedia.

Redmine

http://www.redmine.org

Redmine Issues list

Cost: Free (Open Source)

Pros: Price, Usability

Cons: Requires some technical knowledge to install (though any web developer will be able to tackle it), no commercial support.

Notes: We use Redmine here at Context, and I’m always impressed and how intuitive but powerful the system is.

Basecamp

http://www.basecamphq.com

Basecamp Screenshot

Cost: $24/mo to $149/mo depending on number of projects

Pros: Hosted solution, so setup is completely turnkey. Usability is great, and it has a vast feature set.

Cons: No native support for version control systems like SVN or GIT, which is only an issue for software developers.

Notes: Basecamp is what I recommend for businesses looking to get started with a project management solution. The usability is great, the pricing is reasonable, and it’s ready to go right out of the box.

Jira

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/

Jira Navigator

Cost: $150-$2,000/month depending on number of users

Pros: Enterprise class, packed full of features

Cons: May be too expensive for small agencies, higher learning curve than less sophisticated products

Notes: I used Jira on a large scale web development project a few years ago. There’s a learning curve, but I was impressed with the comprehensive feature set. I would recommend Jira to companies who are willing to invest in their project management software.

Up until last week, we had been using Trac to manage our web development and SEO projects. Initially, Trac managed our workflow well enough to keep us from investigating alternatives. However, as our number of projects and number of people grew, I found that Trac simply wasn’t scaling with us. Each project needs to be set up independently of all other projects, including users and permissions, and creating a new project requires command line intervention. Multiple project support for a single Trac instance has a been a long standing issue, and the progress (or lack of progress) on that front has been recorded in the “infamous” Trac Ticket #130 .

A New Contender

Enter Redmine, which I actually came across by accident. I was looking into Lighttpd as an Apache replacement for an upcoming project that might require all the performance we can squeeze out of our servers. Browsing the Lighttpd docs section, I thought “hm, this is a nice wiki/issue reporting system they have going here”. At first I thought maybe it was custom, but some quick digging showed that it was built on Redmine, an open-source, Ruby on Rails-based project management system.

Some areas of Redmine look nearly identical to Trac, which is fine by me (Trac is good at what it does, it just lacks some key features). You’ll find Roadmap, Activity (Timeline), Issues (Tickets), Repository/SCM, and Wiki implementations that will feel very familiar coming from Trac.  However, Redmine picks up on a lot of areas where Trac wavers or fails. First, it has a web-managed, role-based security setup, so you can manage your users globally, but set roles on a per project basis. Perfect. Redmine also features document & file management out of the box, which is a nice touch, as is the support for sub-projects, which I’ve already found to be quite useful. Generally, the system is just very intuitive and the default theme has a very clean, polished look.

Installation

As I mentioned earlier, Redmine is built on the increasingly popular and influential Ruby on Rails framework. Installation was fairly easy, and would probably have been a snap if not for the fact that I didn’t already have Ruby on Rails running on the server I was installing to. You can read my notes from the Install (Apache 2.2 / RoR / FreeBSD / Passenger ) here.

Conclusion

At least for the moment, I’m ecstatic about the switch. Obviously we haven’t been on the system very long, so I’ll be sure to update if we hit any hiccups or roadblocks. I have to be grateful to the Trac project due to the time we spent on Trac, but we needed something that didn’t require as much administrative effort to maintain. Also, Redmine’s Trac migration script made the change a breeze.