Slashdot Mirror
What Does Everyone Use For Task/Project Tracking?
JerBear0 writes "I work as the sole IT employee at a company of about 50 people. I handle programming, support, pretty much anything that is IT related, or even that plugs in. As seems to be true with many small companies, the priorities seem to shift quite frequently. As a result, I've always got multiple programming (both new systems and improvements/changes to existing systems), integration, research, maintenance tasks/projects on my To Do list, in varying stages of completion. At any given time, I need to be able to jump back to one of these items and pick up where I left off. I am currently using Outlook Tasks, and then end up referencing my notebook and email for those dates to figure out exactly where I left off. It works, but not well. If it's been a while, I'll end up losing an hour or two just tracking everything down. I looked at using MS Project / OpenProj, but they want an individual file for each project, and I want at least the project/task list all on one screen. Essentially what I'd want would be a Task List on steroids, allowing for hierarchical subtasks, attachments, and prioritization. Ideally it would be a desktop app, but a locally-hostable web app would be okay. In some of these projects I may want to include proprietary information, which I really don't want floating out in the cloud outside of my control. I know I'm not alone in this problem, so what do you guys (gals) use to address this?"
I use redmine, see http://www.redmine.org/
We've upgraded to soft clay tablets and pointy sticks from hand painting on cave walls. There was a great debate on the merits of the permanence of the new technology until Ugh pointed out that the clay tablets harden if you leave them on the fire and that you can also take them with you when moving to the summer caves.
A combination of Bugzilla and Wiki. Wiki keeps track of backlog. Bugzilla keeps track of tasks.
If you're going down this road, then just install and configure Request Tracker. It's got great workflow management, uses email (which works for all but network-related tasks) as the primary interface and has some great reporting tools, so at the end of every month you can hand your boss a shiny little report showing just how productive you are.
For bonus points, it also stores the history of every request, so if you need to, you can also demonstrate to your boss what a prick Henderson in HR is, and that you cut off his Internet access because he didn't seem to be able to stay away from Furry sites during working hours.
Okay, seriously: RT is well-designed, well-documented and well-supported. It's got a lot of solid add-ons (which might or might not have significance for a 1 man IT dept.), and though it takes a little effort to grasp, it's remarkably rewarding in terms of simplifying your day.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Trac is a Bugzilla, Wiki, and then some - plus it has thousands of plugins. Also easy to administer and manage. Great tool, I use it for many projects.
What's the advantage of using the proprietary options over Trac? Especially since that can run on top of an advanced VCS like GIT, I think it's pretty close to ideal.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();