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 they 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 😉
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.