Project Management tool that helps in retrospective/analytics [closed]

Question

I am looking for a project management tool that has support for the following analytics-related requirements:

• Be able to see the historical progress or trend (red/yellow/green) of the project.
• Be able to visualize how often the scope of the work increased and how it impacted the project dates.
• At any given point, be able to visualize or see the overall completed work and remaining work.
• How often were resources pulled out of the project?

Thanks, Murali

Answer 1

I would suggest to take a look at Eylean Board. It has most of the capabilities and for those that it does not, it offers alternative ones. The reports offered are comprehensive and live, which keeps you to keep track of the team at any time. I am sure you could get exactly what you are looking for out of it.

Answer 2

I find that FogBugz works great for this.

Joel Spolsky goes into detail about how the evidence-based scheduling in FogBugz works in this blog post.

It easily solves the first three points that you require. See the section "Scope Creep" for details on the second point.

I'm not so sure that it satisfies your fourth requirement, although the section on slope creep would allow you to see how simplifying your project on a given day impacts the projected ship date. It also lets you see your projected ship date based on how many levels of priority you complete. If you want to pull resources from the project, you can simply demote these tasks or requirements to the lowest priority level and disregard them. Likewise, you'll be able to see how removing these items affects your ship date simply be comparing the estimated ship dates if you satisfy items with this level of priority or not.

Answer 3

Not aware of any one software that does it all and it would be very unusable if it did it all.

Some items like impact analysis and scope of work are subjective and change dynamically. This stuff is best handled in phases where you capture a snapshot at the end of each phase.

CollabNet can help you monitor the progress (red/yello/green) and also the overall completion and remaining work.

Answer 4

Depending on how you manage contacts, billing, time tracking, and other needs - you would likely benefit more from an integrated solution. Something that allows you to manage projects in the same place that you manage your business contacts, sales, timesheets, and overall business collaboration. This way you can save on subscription costs by keeping the number of apps you're using low. Also, workflow efficiency drastically increases when everything you need to manage operations is in one place.

WORKetc puts a powerful set of project management features into an online app that you can also use to manage CRM/time tracking and billing. The project management features include multiple project views (including Gantt, project trees, activities by people involved, etc), as well as detailed reporting across your business. Managing timesheets in the same app also allows for some added reporting functionality as well as a lot of saved time - and you can attach items together, such as attaching a timesheet, todo, document, and contact within a project.

WORKetc is also Google Apps integrated and just released mobile apps: http://www.worketc.com/project_management_tools

Answer 5

You may want to take a look at this predictive project management tool and play with the scope/speed/schedule to get new projections on when the project would be completed. I believe it is actually free right now.

Answer 6

Jira is an issue, bug and project management tool that if used correctly can give you a great view on all of the points that you mentioned.

Depending of the type of project you are dealing with or the organisation and environment you are working in a choice should be made.

But Jira, in my opinion, covers a wide range of projects.

For example:

You are having a project on a software to develop.

By using Jira, you can create software versions and within each version create and assign issues, bugs, tasks, improvements, etc...

Together with the Greenhopper plugin, this will give you a great view on the status of the executed work within each version and a lot of statistical data and graphs to represent all this.

I'm working on this and use it as a base for my retrospective as well as review to management, and it works great.

I'm sure there are free solutions as well for this...

Answer 7

Comindware Project is an innovative Project Management tool that simplifies planning for project managers and facilitates execution for team members. It provides project teams with a real-time view on project priorities and delivery dates, calculates the actual resource workload and availability as well as automatically tracks task completion progress.I would suggest you this tool to manage your tasks.