Project Management Tools

[VOIPoTim]

Hey Guys,

I know some of you work in tech companies with development going on so maybe you have some recommendations here.

What are your favorite project management tools for small development teams these days?


I'm looking at some new options for our VOIPO dev team because I'm not fully happy with what we currently have.

A lot of stuff seems like it's very overkill for our needs and complicates things more...is there a simple elegant solution out there that still gives all the functionality and visibility needed to help organize the workload for small teams in a fast paced/rapidly changing environment?

Anyone work with project management software and have recommendations suited for a small development team?

[Ansextra]

Tim,
What specifically are you looking for? The industry standard is MS Project. I am a telecommunications PM.

[VOIPoTim]

Tim,
What specifically are you looking for? The industry standard is MS Project. I am a telecommunications PM.

Just looking at different options that might be better than JIRA. New stuff is always coming out and it's been a while since I've looked.

[Ansextra]

I am not familiar at all with Jira. In fact I never heard of it until you mentioned it. I am not familiar with any PM group collaboration software other than MS Project and not even that so much as my company is only now starting to roll out the server version. We have used the individual MS Project for years.
Good luck!

[MHedish]

Tim,

As Ansexta said, MS Project is indeed the standard. Jira is more of a ticketing system (read: Incident Management & Problem Management) than a project management system. If you're looking for an alternative, try Basecamp. If you're looking for an ITSM Service Management tool, my favorite is SysAid. I've been using it and recommending it to clients for years.

[acelisGC]

May seem a little out there... but a great active wiki can be an awesome development tool.
I ran a product development department for an ISP and we used http://sourceforge.net/projects/dekiwiki/ from MindTouch... it's open-source and free.
There are other Wiki's out there... and I honestly don't remember why we settled on that one.

We kind of used it the way most larger companies use SharePoint... but way easier (and it's not Micro$$$$oft).

It not only was our intranet, but allowed all departments to enhance collaborative efforts on projects by publishing and sharing in real time.
We could script in ACD reports from the call center, the programmers can easily document bugs and development milestones, our NOC would have a dashboard of planned maintenance, stuff that's broken or upcoming things that needed to be done, etc etc...

It's not a gantt chart like MS Project with milestones and prereqs, labor time tracking, etc... but it was a nice tool to add collaboration amongst dev teams.