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1710

answers:

9

I work at a smallish web agency (3 programmers, 2 project managers), we mostly make sites for marketing campaigns and also some larger sites. Most of our projects are a week, maybe two, in development. The majority of projects are only worked on by a single developer.

Up until now we've been using a spreadsheet in Google Docs to keep track of current and upcoming projects. But lately we've been feeling this is a bit imprecise, it's hard to tell the size and scope of a project just by a single cell in a spreadsheet. And looking further, as we expand, this won't be a viable option even if we make some changes to the spreadsheet.

Most of the (admittedly few*) project/time management tools I've looked at focus more on a small number of projects with a large number of tasks. Not caring too much about who does what.

What we want is something that can work comfortably the other way around, many projects assigned to few developers with a handful of tickets/tasks for each project.

I'm also having trouble finding software that gives a good overview of what is assigned to a single developer and the expected workload he will have.

Is there such a software?
If not, what would be a good starting point for rolling our own?

* The major ones I've looked at so far are activecollab, redmine, fogbugz and trac, right now redmine feels to be the most fitting

Update: I've been fooling around a bit more with Redmine, and even though I've never touched Ruby before seems to be rather easy to fiddle around with. I hacked up the timesheet addon to show future work instead of completed hours in an afternoon. Now my main obstacle will be convincing our Project Managers to give it a try ;)

+6  A: 

FogBugz - a plug for our host.

gimel
I haven't really figured out how to make fogbugz behave in the way I want it to, but I guess I'll have to give it a second try!
grapefrukt
FogBugz is not meant for many small projects, but it's usable. We use it at work, and we do have many small projects - most of the pseudo-drop-downs with the list of projects are horrible! There is, also, no way for me not to see projects that I have nothing to do with.
Paulius Maruška
+11  A: 

I would probably try to use something like Redmine for that. It is not project management per se, it is more forge-like software but it has time-tracking, fora, documents & files uploading, a lightweight gantt-chart and bug/issue tracker. It is evolving quite rapidly, can even import Trac data.

Keltia
I really like where redmine is going, being able to disable modules per project is especially nice. Too bad I don't know any ruby, but I guess that can be remedied...
grapefrukt
I hope redmine can import from fogbugz. So that when I have to move out of fogbugz (when we grow more than 2 persons) we can move to redmine.
cnu
I like Redmine (the Bitnami virtual appliance version) and currently use it since last year.
eee
+2  A: 

I would say fogbugz. It all depends on cost though. Most of the products/apps mentioned in the question are free or open source. If cost is a problem then one of those apps would be great.

The other nice thing about fogbugz is they can host it for you. For such a small team you may not want to worry about hosting the other software products yourself and making sure they are backed up and all that.

Just things to think about. I have tried most of those products and settled on fogbugz in the end. I am also a part of a very small team and it worked great.

Joshua Hudson
+2  A: 

You could also look at: http://www.dotproject.net/

I used it a couple of years ago and it wasn't too shabby.

Bearddo
+1  A: 

Basecamp... for sure!

Suffice to say I got a non-techie team on it and they're loving life now! We, techies, have loved for months!!! :D

Levi Figueira
A: 

What about RationalPlan?

Single Project Version, Multi Project Version and Free Project Viewer:

http://www.RationalPlan.com

Ioan Lucian

+3  A: 

Well, I work on a team of 8 people, and we have a portfolio of something like 50 projects, and counting...

I'm using redmine and everything seems to work just fine...

opensas
A: 

We are using VisionProject and are really satisfied with that. Every user has a dashboard where they can see the work assigned to them (this can also easily be seen by anyone else as well who has permissions). You can have A LOT of projects (I believe we have over 100 active projects), but you only see the ones that you are involved in. This makes it really flexible.

You should try it out. We found a lot of systems to test before we found this one, but after we found this we don't believe that they have any competitors at all (of course for what we are using).

MattPro
A: 

If, by chance, your team were comfortable with using Emacs, then org-mode (http://orgmode.org/) would be ideal.

cristobalito