Software for managing multiple projects.

Question

Does anybody have any recommendations on software to use for managing resources on multiple projects?

I work in an internal development department and the team typically has 3 or 4 projects that are live at one time as well as day to day support and ad-hoc requests. I currently schedule them using MS Project but this seems to be designed to manage 1 project at a time. This doesn't seem to suit my needs.

All I want is :

when I get a new request is to be able to schedule it in, assign a developer to it, see what I have achieved in a month and what is outstanding

Answer 1

Ontime from axosoft, has developer queues and project management at the level you require. For the more advanced people it has source control integration, as well as email checking support. Now to be fair. Try fogbugz, since they kinda are a part of stackoverflow. Cons: both cost money.

Answer 2

@ChanChan: I already use FogBugz (v5) but only for bug tracking. I've not really explored it as a PM tool though.

Answer 3

You should look at Trac (free). After understanding how Trac (and other issue management software operates), take some time to think of the different features and metrics you want to collect. Afterwards, look at the available issue management software and choose the one that fits you best. Trac also easily integrates with Subversion and Eclipse. Both Trac and Subversion allow you to create repositories to hold multiple projects, so they act exclusively, but are really contained within the repository.

Answer 4

For small teams Basecamp from 37Signals is good.

Answer 5

@John, we used, MS Team Foundation, and then quickly moved to OnTime, as it allowed our help desk to have a section of the product and our marketing to have a section of the product and our developers to have a section of the product. So support has "bugs" and marketing has "features", and our pm takes that big list and creates related "tasks" and the developers just work through their queue for any given iteration.

Answer 6

You should be able to manage multiple projects using MS Project. One approach would be to have summary tasks for each project inside of one project file. If you are managing all of the projects yourself this is often the easiest to manage solution. The downside is that many of the built in analysis tools really are aimed at there being one project in the file.

The other way to do this is create separate project files but use a shared resource pool. To do this create one project that you use just to put your resources in. You may even want to add tasks for non-project work to better model actual developer bandwidth. After you save this project you can use Tools>Resource>Share Resources to specify the file that is your shared resource pool. If you do this for each of you projects you can then see resource availability across projects

Answer 7

I was in a very similar situation a while back, and we used a bug tracking tool called Mantis. I wasn't particularly fond of Mantis itself, but it got the job done. The project manager could assign tasks and see how much progress we made, as you discussed.

So if you're already using FogBugz, I would say go ahead and try treating support requests and new features as "bugs" and see how that works for you. I suspect your developers will appreciate having all of their work assignments in one place. I know I did.

Answer 8

At my company I just installed Redmine. It was a little difficult to get completely set up as I've never done anything with Ruby before, but now it's working quite nicely.

We mainly use it as a bug tracker (we were using Bugzilla, but the interface scared away all non-technical employees. "Commit? I don't want to commit, I want to save. Where is the save button?")

It's got a

• Bug/Issue tracker
• Wiki
• Repository browser
• Spiffy graphs for who's done what in said repository
• News
• Forum
• Document storage (for .Doc file and whatnot)

It's pretty nice.

Answer 9

@Patrick I have considered using FogBugz for everything but I couldn't easily see a way for more complicated projects to be broken down into sub tasks.

@N8g I currently use your one project file solution but after 3 months and over 60 tasks I'm finding the Gantt chart just unreadable. When I trying have a planning meeting I find that it is difficult to use. Your second solution of mulitple files is just seems too heavyweight for most of the work I am given.

@AndyB @ChanChan Basecamp and onTime both look interesting.

Has anyone used Mingle?

Answer 10

Fogbugz is the best tool I have found in all this years.

Answer 11

I too have used Mantis, in my opinioon, it is nice but kinda "dirty" I did like that I could get to the code and customise it myself though.

Answer 12

I've used QuickBase - good for project and issue management and very configurable and also SmartSheet (which I highly recommend)

Answer 13

http://targetprocess.com/ is worth considering, and will do everything you have stated you require.