Should project management software be comprised of the technologies the developers use?

Question

As owner of and project manager for a medium (~20 devs) Rails shop, I find myself constantly sifting through a dozen tabs trying to gauge any given project's current status. My team embraces continuous integration and rigorous unit testing; we use GitHub, Trello, FogBugz, and Slack for version control, feature/issue tracking, and communication respectively. I'm curious to know the daily work-flow of other PMs, especially before reporting to clients.

Internally, we're contemplating aggregating commit messages, Kanban sprites, recent Slack messages, open issues, etc. and some basic metrics into a single dashboard to simplify this "dozen tabs" conundrum. The aim of the internal project is to dissuade the replication we observed while using Asana. Tasks would be assigned through Asana and immediately find themselves on a Trello board.

Is there any value mapping textual exchanges, e.g. the assignment and completion of a feature in Trello, to the code base, e.g. a commit message and git hash?

Wondering if any other PMs would find such a dashboard useful? Whether we should open it to the public?

Answer 1

I think ideally you would be able to use a subset of functionality from your dev systems as your project management tool(s). However, it sounds like you have a lot of systems in the mix. The problem is that when you aggregate outputs from these systems into an entirely new system you've just created even more moving parts to manage. It may work and help for a little while but you'll eventually change out one of the parts in your system. Will that blow up your whole system? Why do you use all of these separate systems now instead of finding one that does (nearly) everything to reduce the number of moving parts?

For me, this would make it all more difficult to drive value and clarity to my customers and team, so I'd look at consolidating. May mean the tools are more expensive, but in the end if you have fewer moving parts you'll be better off. Don't go the route of 16 tools with automated connections between. The time spent on this could have been spent on licensing for a better setup.

Good luck.

Answer 2

I was told that Project Managers will be replaced by automated software. In a way, that is true.

But what project management was (and still is), then? It is partly setting up processes to embrace change, communicate promptly, assess and manage risks, facilitate teamwork, measure quality and progress, etc.

The bottom line is (unless you are a mere project coordinator - PMP definition and acception used here): you are there to help the professionals do their job, reduce the stress and the hiccups, and keep everything on beat (musical metaphor intended - jazz players please intend off beat!). Which software your team is using is, partly, your choice. Therefore, as long as you keep updated on the tools and processes, your job as project manager will never die.

In the future, project managers may be less in number, but much more skilled... or they will be more in number, less skilled, less paid. Who knows?

Think about the industrial revolution and the forecast of nobody working in the factories anymore...

Then think about the information era, its revolution and the forecast of nobody working because everything about information management will be automated. Think about how many developers are needed in the next 20 years to fulfill the needs for the information industries.

Then think about the third industrial revolution, where robots will replace all human contribution in the build chain, but still... it seems that humans are needed somehow.