Management and collaboration

For a few years now I’ve been a strong advocate of JIRA and Confluence from Atlassian. These are two fabulous tools for task management, project tracking and collaboration. (We’re applying for an open source license for both of them, hopefully we’ll be using them for OCMS).

JIRA is simply, hands-down the best task management system I’ve used. Its web browser interface works with any browser and is brilliantly easy to use. You can customize it to provide actually useful, productive features for development staff. This is not an onerous time tracking system — this is a tool that helps developers get organized and stay focused. It happens to provide all the project management tools I need as a manager, as well — iteration workload reports, time tracking and load balancing reports.

Confluence is, basically, a very well done wiki. It is commercial grade, automatically integrates with JIRA, and (just like JIRA) has a brilliant user interface. Confluence is a great place to aggregate documentation, designs, discussions — you name it. It’s a collaborative workspace.

If you are running a development project — particularly something that uses an agile methodology — take a look at these products. Incidentally the cost is very reasonable. And apparently the folks at Atlassian know how to have a good bit of fun every now and again, and that’s imporant.