So lemme introduce you to Jira. Jira is the software CIG and many other companies use to track work. If you've used Trello before you'll be familiar with the basic concept.
Jita was originally created as a customer support ticketing system, so the word "issue" is a legacy holdover from that time. Issues in Jira just means "thing to do". In softwareland parlance if we wanna write up a task that could be completely unrelated to a problem (like, say, add animated cat gifs on the website) that would be called writing a ticket or writing an issue. It doesn't mean there's a problem. Hence why the things are listed as tasks, and some are listed as bugs.
Jira is an issue tracking tool and is used for software product management (for agile). It's a way to help track what individual members of teams are doing at any one time. We use it for lots of projects and it has lots of plugins that make it rather powerful.
There are only a few instances that I can think of that would require extra experience and then the experience would be for people in IT not JIRA.
APPS-1270 looks a lot like the way you would format a JIRA ticket. For those that don't know, JIRA is one of the most popular ticketing systems for software engineering. If this is the case there was a project with a short name of "APPS" and "1270" would refer to the issue number.
Someone would have opened a ticket in APPS, that says something like "write a script that can send a post to the top of /r/all" So the person wrote said program, and included the ticket name.
Also the subreddit is a private one called /r/QABuddyReddit ... QA stands for Quality Assurance. My guess is they tested this on the Development server, and it worked. Next step was to test it on Production. They used a Private QA server, and though they would see it get lots of upvotes, and that would be the final test before using it on "real" posts. However, either the subreddit wasn't private at the time, or /r/all is coded in such a way that it ignores private servers when calculating what shoud go on the site.
I think they showed their hand, but it's ok as this will go down the memory hole, and now they know the code works. Expect to see it used on posts, but with actual content.
Counterpoint: It wouldn't be that hard to deploy a JIRA, the professional license for which starts at US$10 a year. And there are lots of people here who'd be happy to volunteer to help out with it.
I'd just like to see this sub be something other than postings about known bugs over and over and over.
It's called a Kanban board and it's a very popular and effective way to track work. It is not a replacement for project management tools like Gantt charts or Microsoft Project.
Basically, you set up four columns: TODO, Blocked, In Progress and Complete. When you get a new ticket/bug/feature in the queue, it goes into TODO. Whatever you're working on at the current moment gets moved to In Progress. If you get stuck on a ticket due to an external factor (e.g. waiting for another person to finish a depdency) you move it to Blocked. If you need to switch gears and work on something else, you move the ticket back to TODO. When the work is done it moves to Complete.
It's a very simple, easy to use and effective way of tracking tasks. Trello is popular because it's free and flexible- I'd say the main other competitor is JIRA, which is very expensive in both money and administration time (but has a ton of awesome features for large organizations).
Yes, a lot of the functionality you described is possible with excel and VBA scripting, but you would essentially need a developer to construct the system, troubleshoot issues, or make any changes down the line.
What you really need, is a ticketing or project management system!
Although it was created to support software development, I would suggest perusing Jira Cloud edition. You access the service through a web portal (it's surprisingly fast and clean). In my experience they have excellent documentation and customer support. I believe their pricing model is $10/user/month. (Yes, you can easily export all of your work to emails and whatnot.)
I know it's possible to develop a system to support what you're requesting as I was just modifying a similar workflow I built for my department earlier today. However, depending on your technical background it may be more efficient to purchase professional assistance from Atlassian (the parent company) instead of trying to do it alone.
Although Jira was originally created to support an Agile workflow, the tool is powerful enough to be used in regular project management (we use a mix of AGILE and ITIL). I personally learned from their online documentation, but that was only after working at the company for 2 years so I was already familiar with the core concepts.
There are other systems that are free, like OTRS. They are much more difficult to set up though and you will have to build your own server before you can even use them
Short answer: Apply some basic project management skills.
My org uses Jira. Every single "piece of work" gets at least one corresponding Jira issue. You can optionally log hours to Jira issues if you want to be extra studious. In terms of measuring impact/difficulty of a task, in Agile methodology this is often referred to as "story points".
My org claims an awful lot of R&D tax credits for the work my team does, so we need to be particularly good about logging our time for certain tasks in case the company is audited.
This - sort of like trello (similar to what phasmophobia devs use). It's a development board where they post notes.
No it isn't. Perfect example: JIRA.
Teams of 10: $10 for a JIRA instance. Teams of 11: $1,800 for a JIRA instance. Teams of 26: $18,000 for a JIRA instance.
10 is probably just a private developer or two. 11 is probably a team in a small business. 26 is probably a corporation.
The Jira issue tracker could be a good alternative. It's the one Mojang uses to track bugs in Minecraft. It's way easier to spot duplicates and keep everything organized. I also think most people find confusing to report bugs on a forum and would be more comfortable to do so using a form on a bug tracker site.
I have years of experience with Redmine, it was good for a while but after a certain number of projects and tasks it became unwieldy. As I started doing more SCRUM, I tried other tools, pivitoltracker, trello with SCRUM extensions... but they were all half-baked for our needs.
JIRA was like a breath of fresh air. We use portfolio which helps keep development inline with the business side, and confluence business wide. Being able to reference the knowledge base from the issue tracker and vice versa is wonderful.
Right now we're still using gitlab internally, but looking into moving to bitbucket and stash to have better integration with our issue tracker and version control. Then Bambo for CI and better QA / deployment processes.
We also use HipChat (internal communication) and Crowd (SSO), though I think HipChat isn't as feature-rich as Slack.
I'm pretty much sold on the Atlassian suite now that I've been using it for a while. My only gripe is minor, the comment formatting isn't markdown but more of a wiki syntax.
I can't speak to VSO, but if it's a cost thing, try selling your boss on how Atlassian tools can improve development processes relative to business strategies. At minimum, for your needs, look into JIRA Agile and Portfolio add-ons. Good luck!
I do not know if your company or company's devs are in the Atlassian world, but I know they have a JIRA add-on for a helpdesk. I cannot speak for how useful it is, but I know that Atlassian does a great job with their own products and the integrations between is aways amazing.
This is a system called "JIRA". It is available for anyone whom wants to purchase from Atlassian. EDIT: It is also a very powerful and good manager for things like these.
This needs to stop. When I, as a single user, buy the desktop or ipad version - I do expect to get the other one for free. I hate paying double for single-user software.
The worst exmaple of this is the new Adobe Lightroom application. I paid nearly 200$ for it, now they just released an iPad version which they want 10 or 20$ A MONTH for. What would I get out of that, you might ask.. the ability to synch my photos with my iPad.
Anyways.. you might want to check out https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira .. not sure if the website even works from the ipad, but this is as good as project management tools get. If you are looking into self hosting, I will re comment Redmine instead.
Try using Jira Advanced Roadmaps - called Jira Plans earlier. Depends on the version you are using.
What you would have to do is:
There are some team, capacity, dependency, release, field configuration you should know how to do.
Look up Atlassian's own tutorial to understand how to set it up !
Maybe look at Jira Service Desk. $10 for 3 agents. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-desk
Also, ManageEngine has a pretty unlimited product now, but it could do what you want. ManageEngine is a bit buggy.
There are many open source products and this gets asked a lot. The ones I mentioned aren't and I don't have a good suggestion because I've never found something open source that did what I wanted.
I would look at Jira, but as you get bigger, the price goes up.
No problem. Didn't answer the last part though. The day-to-day.
Right now, I'on a very big (for me) project. We started in August and could eventually be a full year. We have a tool called Jira I get all my tasks from. I come in, continue what I was working on previously or start a new task. Right now, tasks can take multiple days. Code, test, code, test, merge my working branch into the feature branch, and push up. Create a new branch and perform an install of the project. Install takes about five minutes and ensures I have clean code and data. Update my timesheet as often as I can remember during the day. We do client work so I'm a billable asset and my time is where the company gets money. Help other devs either on my team or anybody else. Do any admin/email stuff that needs to get done. Maybe a meeting or two a week.
But I'm in a dev shop. That's what we do. Four of five employees are developers. We do client work. Day to day is really going to be a factor of where you work and now what you do. The same job could be completely different depending on the company. Worked at a small company where my day to day was random and did everything from server admin, coding, writing scopes, leading a team, and pretty much any other hat you could find. To a large corporation where there were meetings and meetings and revisions and projects getting cancelled and working with overseas outsourced teams.
The best places to work are places that value you and your craft. At least for me.
We use JIRA, it's inexpensive for a small team and suits our needs well (combined bug tracking, project planning and task management).
We also use the 'Agile' plugin which can be used as a sort of task board which I'd recommend too.
If you want to do it in Jira btw you dont have to have estimated everything at all btw. Check out "roadmaps for Jira" plugin. You can add your features and your stories underneath it, also if they are not estimated. It generates a gannt-chart like view.
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/features/roadmaps
I use it all the time, it works nicely.
Do you have a ticketing system? If not, either talk to your sysadmin to install one and/or give you access, or use jira ( https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira ) as an immediate solution, so you can prioritise projects.
Eu folosesc JIRA pentru proiectele mele personale: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira E subscription-based (platesc 12€/luna) dar din experienta mea cel putin, merita cu prisosinta.
Cel mai mare avantaj e ca iti poti imparti proiectele mari in bucatele mai mici si pe masura ce completezi bucatelele astea devii motivat/a sa continui pentru ca ai dovada tangibila ca progresezi. Cu JIRA am reusit sa scriu si sa editez un manuscris maricel (in jur de 80k de cuvinte) in doi ani si un pic, asta dupa ce am procrastinat pe el vreo 5-6 ani. De-asta il recomand tuturor acum.
Cat despre motivatia in sine, mi-am facut un wallpaper care zice "Fa ce vrei sa faci, chiar daca "n-ai chef". Nimeni n-a avut vreodata succes bazandu-se pe ce ar fi putut sau ar fi vrut sa faca." ca sa il am mereu sub nas. Da, uneori e greu sa-ti pui c*rul in scaun si sa te apuci de lucru cand ai prefera sa dormi sau sa iesi la sala/cumparaturi, dar stii vorba aia cu "pofta vine mancand".
Daca ai nevoie de ajutor cu JIRA sau tips & tricks specifice, zi-mi sau da-mi un mesaj in privat. Bafta si spor!
Jira with potentially 200k+ users (that's what this sub's subscriber base looks like now)? No, thank you. Not to mention the costs.. I really don't want a subscription in order to help pay for a bug tracker that would eventually break the developer anyway.
Jira Service Desk does something like this. But I've never used it before--just remembering seeing a product video about it or something.
We use Confluence for documentation. Technically, you can pair it with Jira Helpdesk, but we use a separate ticketing system. Confluence is like $10/year if you have fewer than 10 authors.
In that case, you'll have to convince the owner/President that it's a good idea, but you also have a few more potential arguments in favor, like that it can help you coordinate work across a newly-grown team and make it easier for other employees to make sure their questions get routed to the right person for the job—e.g., if you subordinates are handling the more basic tasks, having people come to you directly with questions about those things is a waste of a more valuable person's time when someone else could have handled it.
You could take a look at and play around a bit with JIRA Service Desk or Zendesk Support. Both are popular online helpdesk software with free trials and reasonably cheap basic plans—JIRA has a flat $10 per month plan for up to 3 "agents" (i.e., people who respond to requests) and Zendesk has a basic plan for $5 per agent per month. Might be worth seeing if you like it/think it would help.
If you're already using confluence, Jira is a no brainer for a ticketing system. Jira itself has ticketing built in, but it's based around dev life cycles, not IThelpdesk check out their addon to get a proper helpdesk dashboard. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-desk
We used it for awhile and it takes a bit of jira knowhow to really customize it, but overall worked well. I especially liked the SLA timers built into each ticket to show techs which tickets needed to be worked. And of course jira's reporting with graphical summaries is great.
Off the top of my head I'd recommend Invison (https://www.invisionapp.com/) for managing the proofs process. Designs are viewed in browser via share links and clients can comment on them as necessary - it cuts out the email edits back and forth. I also believe it's free for the most part. It's a nice interface for both design teams and customers. I'm not aware of an export function in Invision as you upload the designs to the system in the first place.
In terms of job lists and management, I've had good success using Jira with Agile for the teams I manage - https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira. Put simply, you create projects (e.g. email design) and sub-tasks within that project (e.g. initial concept, client edits round 1, etc.) in the system and assign team members to the tasks. Each project or type of task can be assigned to a customised workflow to track it's status through the phases.
I've found it useful to get a sense of where each team member is at and it provides good visualisation of where each task is at, provided the teams buy in to it and keep it up to date. You can also export the tasks from the system to Excel which you can then print if you need to.
A free (and more simple) alternative would be something like Trello or Asana which basically track to-do-lists rather than statuses. Those might work as a first step.
It's inherent with moving to a software solution that you minimise the amount of paper floating about. If you're working in a digital industry like myself (I'm making an assumption based on the email design job) then it's kind of strange that they want to keep a paper record of everything. Strikes me as being pretty old school - you're probably thinking the same - so you'll probably still be doing a lot of printing!
Anyway, hope this helps.
+1 for what u/Siheng wrote.
Use something like Jira or Trello to organise your backlog.
There are countless of online UML tools available. I recently used Sketchboard. It supports collaboration and exporting the diagrams to PDF or PNGs.
By doing something like that you can attach the Sketchboard URL to your ticket or uploading a PDF/PNG file.
Don't do this with sticky notes, pen & paper or just keeping things in your head. You'll just forget stuff and end up not being able to prioritise what features you should implement first.
I guess my question is, will all future governments be held to the same standards, in that they have a "Metre" of their own? If that's the case, fine. I'd personally still prefer a progress tracker that goes beyond partisanship, but if each future parties elected to government are also held to the same standard and have their own progress tracker, then it's fine I think.
In software development, there are various tools that software development companies leverage to track progress (for instance: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/, which is one of the more popular tools used by software companies). These tools track what's called "stories and tasks", and if those goals are not met, the product owner (development managers, product managers, etc) gets flack. At a political level, Canada is the product, and the government is the product owner. They are liable for missed goals. You replace the product owners, and goals, stories and tasks may be re-prioritized, but the capability for quantifiable evidence of performance (by measuring product growth) still persists.
TL;DR: It's product-driven evaluation, not partisan-driven evaluation.
Atlassian has some pretty sweet products and you can get a good few of them self hosted for $40(for a small team). Or pay that same amount but monthly and they'll provide the service online(cheaper if you just go with Jira).
I've not heard of the 3 you're asking about, if they've got some better advantages over Jira would be keen to know :)
Without more information about the work you'll be doing, it's hard to recommend something specific. I haven't used it (yet) but I've heard good thigns about Jira for tracking jobs and tasks: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
;)
I share your frustration with todo apps though. At least, I think I do. A while ago I realized that I never clear out old todos, so now I'm content in knowing it's more of a time capsule of my day-to-day priorities going back to ~2012.
All of my important stuff for various projects is now in Jira, and its ability to show you a nice overview of everything that's going on in your current sprint is fantastic. This seems a much better, more organized system than any todo app I've ever used.
Relaxation was definitely needed and planned on an as-needed basis. As I said in the blog post, I left school almost every day at 11pm for my first two years at DigiPen. On the days I didn't leave that late, I went to work out at the gym, went home early to play games, or hanged out with friends from my study group; also, when the weather was nice, I would go jogging or play ultimate frisbee. How much game project work left to do was the major factor I considered when balancing time between work and leisure. My team didn't really employ a systematic method to maximize productivity. We just used Jira to track our progress and had weekly meetings; that's about it.
As for the second question, yes, I had been dreaming about going to Naughty Dog since high school (circa 2004) when I was back in Taiwan. After coming to DigiPen, my plan was to get a job somewhere else, build up experience, get a green card, and then apply for Naughty Dog (because a foreigner with only a work visa can't switch companies without leaving the US to wait for another work visa). As luck would have it, I ran into Naughty Dog's recruiter at GDC 2013, things happened, and my plan was fast-forwarded by 5-6 years. You can read the whole story here.
I purchased a "host it yourself" licence for JIRA (https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira) and run a server on my local machine. Its extremely powerful and only cost $10 if you use it for 10 users or less.
Tasks are not very useful to keep around after a sprint is completed. Stories, Tech Reqs on the other hand are. They can be useful for changelogs, sprint history and other things.
You can also use software tools, our company uses YouTrack. I hear that JIRA is also popular. YouTrack provides a free version for up to 10 users, so you can try it home.
Since I work for Atlassian I feel any recommendation I make will be heavily biased, but I will upvote your recommendation of JIRA.
If help desk is the specific use case then I would recommend checking out the JIRA Service Desk addon. It's certainly made our lives a lot easier here.
I am really surprised no one mentioned Atlassian's Jira Service Management. If your team is small, you can even go with the free tier - it will have some drawbacks such as limited control, etc. But if you choose the standard, it is still very economical and comes with a lot of features that you may not use today but gradually implement as you need.
If self-hosted is your thing, you can use their DC version (its not ideal and usually targeted for enterprise orgs but it is the only option since the server version went away).
Atlassian has many other products for work management and project management and also has knowledge base product called Confluence that can be very useful for your staff for internal documentation as well self-serve support articles that help deflect repetitive requests.
Btw, Trello is also owned by Atlassian now.
Atlassian has a good tutorial for learning the basics, it might help you get off to a good start. I have sent a link to the part about creating issues.
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/getting-started/basics#step-4-create-an-issue
Kudos to you for wanting to make sure that the data/information you've gleaned becomes actionable rather than a stale exercise left in a book. A lot of people do research and fail to follow up which results in a wasted effort.
There are a few models you can use for your research, documentation, and planning.
SWOT Analysis:
SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses Opportunities, Threats) | HotPMO
Another quadrant analysis, which I can't remember by name, takes your market analysis and challenges you. In this model, you identify your customers, costs, competition, and call to action (what makes you unique). If you can figure out the operating parameters of your competition it helps you figure out how you want to make a name for yourself. You can win by having a larger customer base, having a lower cost (but still profitable offering) or perhaps a niche customer base with a higher quality/value/profitable offering.
Mind maps are huge for me, they really help me get my thoughts out into a visualization tool. I personally enjoy Freeplane as an open source (free) option: Home - Freeplane - free mind mapping and knowledge management software
Gannt charts/road maps can be used when you want to form an action plan. I like the roadmap feature in Jira which is free for very small teams to use. Jira | Issue & Project Tracking Software | Atlassian
I hope this helps a bit. Feel free to reach out for more information.
> It's way less expensive that the Atlassian stuff we have at work
I mean that's not true, Jira + bitbucket is < gitlab. The total for "Standard" Jira and bitbucket is $10/user/month.
In terms of Bamboo that pricing is for a perpetual license so you can't equate that.
> GitLab is orders of magnitude better
Agreed, I hate Jira it's slow and overly complex. It sucks in time getting it all setup. With that in mind I do admit it offers more features than GitLab. I think for full-time project management employees Jira is better but for devs gitlab is better.
> I guess if companies are ready to pay for Atlassian they should be willing to pay less for better, right?
No I suspect this is just to make their finances look better for their IPO. Companies that are using Jira at the moment aren't going to move over to gitlab any time soon. Especially not now that they have increased their pricing.
Jira Automation is a very popular plugin. It has been bought by Atlassian recently. It is as little bit too complex to explain it here, but generally it allows you to create "Rules", rules are like short scripts that runs when triggered. It consist of Trigger, Condition and Action.
So in your case:
- Trigger would be time - i.e each day
- Condition would be issue CreateDate > X
- Action would be Update field by X
You can read more here: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/features/automation
I have a crazy one, what about Jira? Hear me out they have a one time $10 licence for their project manager when you self host. It's definitely not FOSS and I'm not sure if it will work for you but I thought I would throw it in.
jira service desk has very defined costs in the cloud. plus, it can play nicely with other atalassian products you may have in your environment already.
Check out JIRA service desk. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-desk/pricing
But have a look at the functionality built in. You can add-on. Though some add-ons cost extra.
I used JIRA at my previous place and it worked well. The cloud version you only pay $10 a month for 3 service desk users. The users who submit tickets do not cost.
You can setup workflows generate reports etc. I prefer JIRA to Service desk plus. (Using SDP currently.)
I work at a small startup and we didn't have a ticketing system. We are rolling out Jira Service Desk. $10/month for up to 3 technicians. Works for us.
document management system
Jira - https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
Confluence - https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence
A v2 CPU is more then enough. eBay all the way, unless you have some crazy good local stuff on CL.
If you are looking for easy/less complex to start, I would recommend proxmox.
Internally, we reject PRs that don't have proper documentation. PRs are tied to a specific Jira issue with a boilerplate template for qualifying the change(s). By virtue of the workflow, you have to get really sloppy to have your PR rejected for reasons specific to documentation.
Code comments are on an as-needed basis. They're pretty scarce though. With the above, it's pretty trivial to reference the full commit history of a piece of code and get a very good idea of what that piece of code is doing based on the associated Jira issues.
We use Jira.
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
It's oh-so amazing. It's not free, but it's only $10 for 10 users. After that prices spikes big time.
But if you have a small team of only 10 or less folks, check it out! It's really an incredible system.
There are several ways of doing this. You could hook up your second screen on your pc and extend it, the secondary screen could run something like JIRA to show your progress with charts and other visuals.
Alternatively you could get something like the Raspberry Pi and connect you screen with that, the Pi could than something like Thinger to display data about IOT devices.
It all really depends on what you want and if you are looking for something free.
You're thinking of "Jira Software" and /u/SherSlick is talking about Jira Service Desk. :)
Hey! Did you know JIRA has a product for nontechnical teams called JIRA Core? Here's some more information on it: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/core
(Full disclosure: I work at Atlassian, but if you're already using JIRA internally then JIRA Core could be great for you)
Look at JIRA with the hosted model for 1-10 people. Quick overview of projects from the top-level possible. It can manage projects just as easily as track bugs in software.
I use a self-hosted trac server. If I were to do it all again I would look into Jira. Redmine is another one and I would assume GitHub has some sort of ticketing system.
The nice bit about all of these is the integrate with your version control system so when you check something in you can relate it to a particular ticket by embedding particular codes in your check in description.
The also let you group tickets by milestones so you can plan out your work.
Some of my clients use: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira If you are in software development the atlassian suite of tools is pretty decent. They have lots of different addons.
One of my clients used https://campfirenow.com, but I did not like it at all... however, lots of people seem to use it..
My company is developing https://sitiata.com Geared more towards service oriented teams. if you give it a try and find anything you need missing just let me know.
> What are some questions I should be asking our Salesforce consultant?
Which (and how many) of your requirements are easily solved by Salesforce and which require integration or custom development?
What licensing implications exist for your requirements?
How do your data volumes and retention affect licensing?
> We have a need for a bug tracking AND a software life-cycle solution, any recommendations on options (free or paid) available through the AppExchange?
Use JIRA or Pivotal Tracker. Installing AppExchange software for something not functionally related to your CRM is not a good idea and can slow deployments down.
>How are you defining enough work? Enough work is managing to average 6 hours of work per day.
We work 8 hour days. We're allowed 2 hours per day of overhead, i.e. meetings, etc.
We measure it all in JIRA, where we have stories with a number of points assigned to each of them: these points represent effort required, and complexity.
Each "story" has a number of subtasks assigned to it, which splits up the work involved in completing the story. Each subtask has a time estimate for how long it might take, which is based on previous estimates vs actual times spent.
So basically, a day will be spent of me picking subtasks to work on, and working through them, logging how long I spent working on each subtask, then marking it as complete when I have finished it.
>How far short are you falling?
I'm consistently 2 or 3 hours short per day. I can log around 3, or even 4 hours if I think I work hard, but the rest is squandered on distractions like YouTube, IRC, or investigating something thinking it'll only take 5 minutes, but instead it turns into 45 minutes.
JIRA provides a dashboard, where you can attach widgets. One of these widgets is a time sheet, which shows how much time each team member has spent for the last two weeks. Every team member has this on their dashboard, so they can all see how many hours I've logged.
>What things can you do to help yourself get unstuck?
Sticky notes! Our company is always in abundance of sticky notes! Also, reminders to stick to my plan, because I could easily go off track of my plan.
This should be your "enterprise" package. Many enterprise clients either don't trust the cloud or just want to have some control over their data.
Take a look at Atlassian and Jira pricing: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing/?tab=server
costs go way up for server installs.
Process Maker is another good example with open source community version, on premise enterprise and cloud versions: http://www.processmaker.com/processmaker-bpm
I've used Assmebla for subversion. They also do git.
I ended up just self hosting on a cheap Ubuntu box fronted with Edgewall's trac.
Jira is another one I've heard good things about. Can self-host that one as well.
Ahh! I never used Service Desk; I cobbled together my own JIRA projects into Help Desks (and projects for PM's, etc).
NOTE: In order to get JIRA Service Desk, it requires a JIRA License; and that's what I linked to. Read first item on the FAQ. Like I mentioned, it's pricey for a mid-sized company, but I loved it. I could make it do damn near anything.
Customers (end users) are unlimited in the pricing now. You're looking at the Jira User licensing. Customers (end users) no longer count as Jira users.
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-desk/pricing
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/Purchasing/New+pricing+model+for+JIRA+Service+Desk+2.0+FAQ
It sounds like what you're looking for is something like OTRS with the ITSM add-on. It's open-source, runs against PostgreSQL, and they have an appliance for you (here)[https://www.otrs.com/download-open-source-help-desk-software-otrs-free/], so you can get up and running extremely quickly.
If you're not using any helpdesk software, I'd highly recommend that you take a look at something like (JIRA Service Desk)[https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-desk] - hosted costs $20/month for up to 3 agents and unlimited clients. They did a great writeup on how they set up a JIRA project for asset tracking (here)[http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/03/jira-asset-management-overview/].
In addition, you can create separate service desks and portals for your internal users and external clients and different ticket types with different fields for each ticket type (e.g. new user form, service request, software request, and hardware purchase would all have different fields to be filled out). You can also tie it to a Confluence wiki for a self-service knowledge base (hopefully keep some of the easier questions from hitting you). I also tie the asset project tickets to a private BitBucket repo with the config files for each system in question so that everything is easily tracked and a Confluence page with more info on the system.
I use trac. Not sure why you think it doesn't look clean. It does look like it's from the 80s, but in a clean sort of way :) It's pretty easy to customize the look of it.
That said, github has most or more of the features. If you want to pay for something you should give jira a look. If I read their page correctly, a self hosted version can be had for 10 bucks.
I'm a big fan of Atlassian's JIRA https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/jsd for ticket management and for knowledge base articles Confluence https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence
Ridiculously easy to manage and use, pretty powerful as well. I used this at my last office, and wish my new company had it.
JIRA is extremely flexible. Warning, though, if you're not familiar with Atlassian products it can be overwhelming. It's not that it's "complex" it's that you're expected to generate workflows and things of that nature. IMO the configuration is very poorly worded for someone without an Agile background, and even though I work with JIRA every day I often get confused when I need to make major changes to the UI or workflow. There are "screens" "schemes" and other things that affect tickets.
But with that said, you don't need to use any of the agile/scrum features. You can remove issue types, like bug, feature, etc and set it to your own issue types. It's completely malleable.
Anyway, Atlassian made JIRA service desk now. I haven't messed with it, though. I don't really do the MSP thing any longer.
Currently, we use Jira from Atlassian as our main project management / issue tracking software.
It allows our project manager to easily delegate tasks and track progress across multiple projects, and it's pretty easy for the rest of us as well, outside of the email spam that can occur if you don't change your settings.
If only Atlassian would release a first-party mobile app, it would be pretty darned near perfect for small to medium teams. No clue how well it scales to larger teams, though.
EDIT:
Personally, I keep track of my tasks using the BulletJournal system. I started for the first time this year, and there's never been an easier way for me to personally burn down my task list each day, plus it encourages me to keep better records for myself. If you decide to try it out, I recommend a Leuchterm 1917 medium squared notebook instead of the suggested Moleskine large squared -- The Leuchterm already has the pages numbered, has a pre-printed TOC for you to use, offers slightly more writing space, has pre-defined page headers for titles and dates, and offers everything else the Moleskine does for the exact same price.
Sounds like they're looking for previous consulting / sys admin experience as much as Atlassian knowlesge. Prepare to speak to consulting / sys admin experience as much as the atlassian knowledge.
They also list specific Atlassian products:- Jira Service Management- Jira Software- Bitbucket to the customer, both process and configuration.
Experience with JIRA and confluence as a JIRA user (not admin, or product owner) will not provide you with JIRA service management or bit bucket experience. Learn about those products and prepare to speak to them.
Atlassian itself is your best source to learn more about the products mentioned: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/product-guide/overview#the-jira-platform
if you have the time/money an Atlassian cert probably wouldn't hurt. university.atlassian.com
Hey there!
To be honest of the time it is better to actually find an Atlassian partner nearby and contact him with your questions. Not only you will receive info much faster, they will also help you get better price most of the time.
To you question - if you really are looking for small Jira/CFL for 30 people I advise you to start with standard plan. There should not be much in both premium nor enterprise plan what would make a bigger difference.
Also talking about the differences I think this page sums it up: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing but trust for normal team at this size you will hardly come to any limitations of standard plan. Probably the only better thing in premium/enterprise for you would be Advanced Roadmaps app built in those plans. But again, for such small team it is probably not needed and Basic Roadmaps will be just fine.
Also - if your company already uses Jira cloud and they have enterprise plan, they can easily spin another site on different URL for you.
In the end I would still advise contacting a partner and discussing everything with him - in the end you may find that you can still work in same company Jira and only have different set of co figurations applied to your projects to help protect it against unwanted access (like different permission schemes, roles or locking each issue separately by issue security functionality).
I work mostly in the Microsoft/.NET space, so I'm tied to TFS (currently called Azure DevOps Server) most of the time; but, for my Python development, I use Jetbrain's PyCharm IDE and I know a lot of people/teams that use YouTrack by Jetbrains. I've used Jira by Atlassian in the past, but probably would prefer YouTrack, given the reputation Jetbrains has for quality in their tools, etc.
Yes, I am a software engineer and use it for work. So it’s natural to use it in personal life as well. There is a fee tier. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing
Gives me just enough or a rush moving stories to done.
I've worked in both Cloud and On-prem, both work for this.
First, I guess Atlassian calls it Service Management now: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/features/service-desk
Second, I've found two ways to gather more required info in the middle of a ticket's life (aka not at the beginning). The first is subtle, basically putting in a condition check to see if the field is still blank or has a value. If the field is still empty, Jira will not allow the workflow step to happen. The second method is to create a new screen, just with that field, make it required in the field config and put that screen only in the workflow step you need it for.
DM me if you run into any trouble. I also highly advise you to install a scripting utility, like ScriptRunner, where you can code more complicated workflow solutions, or always-on behaviors, that Jira cannot do by default.
Writing a good ticket is an underrated skill.
I've used the Jira REST API within data acquisition pipelines, to e.g. append files to tickets, auto assign tickets back to people that aren't me, but that's probably not a standard usecase. And JQL can be useful, but it's not difficult to learn.
I've asked for demos from partners, both said (in essence) "a demo will fall short unless we tailor it to your team..." I think I've come around to believing that (or it's stockholm syndrome). There are videos on youtube and atlassian-linked case studies that demonstrate non-code-based workflows. However, you have to consider that the people who communicate via post it notes and watercooler conversation might not have the imagination to see how their workflow (which isn't marketing, HR, or whatever else you might find) translates to a program they are potentially unfamiliar with.
Is there sufficient impetus within the company to do everything it takes to get going on a new system? Jira is not cheap, can take a long time to onboard every one, requires maintenance and resources (human and otherwise). If you don't have the buy-in from the key stakeholders, you're almost dead in the water.
Your time might be better spent building a case for a system like Jira. Can you point to a failed or overrun project that was caused by the aforementioned communication methods? Can your teams benefit from a centralized/interdepartmental communication system? Can your managers benefit from increased insight into project status (i.e. no more "let me look in my inbox for that info...").
It's true. Most of the videos out there for Jira are all aimed at Software Dev. Went though a similar problem a few months back when the Marketing team was looking for some tutorial videos.
You need a set list of things they're looking to implement and change in the ERP system, then do/demo those things in Jira, or, see if Atlassian will do a demo (I know they do weekly demos at https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/demo).
If you are looking for a ticketing system, then consider Jira Service Desk which is part of the Atlassian suite. It is actually designed for vendors to communicate with external stakeholders and it can be tracked in Jira. You can embed forms into the service desk so any specific questions or information can be attained from the end-user. I personally use ProForma and embed forms into the Service Desk requisition. Once the service request has been created, it operates similarly to a Jira issue and this information can be fed into Confluence for product design purposes.
Ahhh I see... You basically want everyone's input to be consolidated and automatically update... That's a bit ambitious.. lol. I can understand the practicality though.
Honestly, it sounds like the people doing the flow should at least be responsible enough to change the status of a task from in progress to done when they're done. If they can't even do that, there's no software on Earth that can help you. You might as well look for a program that reads their minds or records their activities so that they're updated as soon as they're done.... Nah, they should be able to dedicate less than 5 minutes to updating the workflow.
And regarding Jira, the new Automation is really user friendly and intuitive. See https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/features/automation
I would check out Advanced Roadmaps: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/roadmaps/advanced-roadmaps
Similar functionality to Gantt but native to Jira Premium
Jira software and Advanced roadmaps might be what you're looking for (should be free with Jira) https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/roadmaps/advanced-roadmaps
Although as everyone has mentioned, a Jira admin really helps to solidify internal processes/codify practices which might stay in your business for years to come
I love Jira for that but you’d have to be willing to manage tickets for all the things you’re doing.
I create epics for all of the milestones in my project with due dates, then tickets within those for the tasks with their own due dates.
Then you can go to the road map page in Jira and it’s laid out nice and clean automatically.
It looks like this (I only use the basic version since execs find it easy to digest): https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/features/roadmaps
JIRA Service Desk is an excellent IT ticketing system that translates well to other business areas. It's highly customizable and likely too much work for a company of your size though.
For this size a properly setup shared kanban board, probably Trello, might work better.
Yes, they're 100% correct here. The JIRA error is technically called a 'fob off'.
But seriously, they've just waterfall with the silos called 'scrum teams'.
In no way is this organisational structure scrum. There's no cross functional teams, organised around the bits of functionality they're delivering.
You know you can get a free licence to use JIRA at home for non profit purposes. Get a licence and have a play around setting up projects. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/free
You'll see that JIRA doesn't specify things like a BA can only do this, or a QA can only do that. It might be that each silo'd team only has permissions to create things like tickets in their JIRA area, but that's a limitation in how they've set up JIRA, not with JIRA.
The only thing I can think of is that they've set up a convoluted structure, and don't want to spend the time creating a new structure and migrating people across into it.
Good luck.
I’ve used Aha (which someone already mentioned) at multiple companies but if you already have experience with Atlassian tools like Confluence then consider Jira Align. This is a product Atlassian acquired a while back and rebranded. It’s aimed at scaled up planning and supports many of the common frameworks like Scaled Agile Framework. It’s probably overkill for smaller orgs but can still be informative to understand what they do and compare and contrast this example of an “enterprise agile planning” tool (Gartner’s term) to Aha and its ilk (Prodplan, Productboard and so on).
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/align
You may also want to look at the Quartz Open Framework. There’s no fancy web app just templates.
Depends on how much tasking and components are in your projects...
We use Jira, we can keep track of parts of a project and all their multiple deadlines on smaller tasks within that project.
You can assign tasks to specific people on your team, add comments and also log how many hours are spent on a specific task.
(You can have up to 10 users in the free version. You have to have the paid one if you want non signed up users to be able to add tasks/requests.)
It’s like an electronic Kanban board for project management!
> so their “data center” products will still be available.
If you're big enough for it. Server and Data Center are two different license variants; they're both self-hosted. The chief technical distinction is that Server is for single application instances; Data Center is for multi-instance HA environments. But Data Center is only available with 500 user licenses and up, whereas Server scales down to 10 users. For a company who's already at or above that tier, Data Center pricing could be a tough pill to swallow (although at the 500-user tier, the annual Data Center subscription is basically equivalent to annual service renewal cost for Server), but for a small business (25 or 50 users), Data Center is totally untenable.
To be honest it'll be difficult for you out of the gate.
I HIGHLY suggest you get yourself a cloud instance (free 30 day test I believe) and it's only 10 dollars a month (last I checked)
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing
​
If you want you can send me a message to take this offline and I will help as best I can.
Looks like they've changed the policy, but failed to publish a clear announcement/email to site admins.
July 20' web archive of JIRA software pricing page shows the flat $10 rate for 10 or less. https://web.archive.org/web/20200710181307/https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing
However, as it's not on the live product pages or other documentation. Atlassian may have silently deprecated the flat rates for 10 or less users. To either force people down to the limited feature set of the "Free" tiers or pony up the fees for Standard licenses.
And yeah, if a service was under 10 users it got the flat fee, for instance if you had 20 JIRA users, but only 7 Confluence users. JIRA would get charged at 20 x 7, but confluence would only be the $10 flat fee. Your Billing > History reports should show the Flat Fee under previous charges.
For capacity planning and resource allocation check out Portfolio
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/portfolio/features
I guess you can do all the planning in the backlog and then when approved put it into a kanban or scrum flow.
Two things I have found to help me find success in group projects are:
1) Start a Discord server for your team. You can chat with text, voice, and video screen share. It's so easy to set up and overall the user experience with using discord is top notch. You can create multiple channels to organize conversations. Also, the underlying theme here is communicate often with your team.
2) Use a task board to assign tasks to each other for accountability and big picture cohesion. Both have a free tier. You can set up a project board with columns like "to do", "in progress", and "done" and you can create tasks that everyone can see and tasks can be assigned to one or more people, and you can move them into the appropriate column to track the work being done. Super helpful for any organizational project that involves multiple people. Personally I recommend Jira but a lot of people like Trello
Good luck!
You did read the part about
>Nach der Bereitstellung des Quick Starts empfehlen wir Ihnen, den AWS-Kosten- und Nutzungsbericht zu aktivieren, um die mit dem Quick Start verbundenen Kosten verfolgen zu können.
AWS (and everyone else) can be cheap, cost-effective or surprisingly expensive, but the costs rarely explode within a day or even a week. They can explode over a month. Very few decisions have immediate and long term cost impact.
So build that thing via the CF templates, use it for a day or 2, and check costs. It'll give you a very good idea how much you'll pay per month.
With a quick calculation of simply adding up the items they list for BitBucket, I get
That's $140.month. You can save costs by removing Aurora and instead building a small Postgres cluster. Would cost about $60/month. That's BitBucket. Same ballpark for Confluence.
For me, hosting this yourself this way makes no sense: it's overkill unless you have to do this. Jira offers free hosting for teams up to 10. Even when self-hosted, it's dirt-cheap (see https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing?tab=self-managed). It gets surprisingly expensive when you add developers, but that cost you always have, whether you host this yourself or not.
> Asana
What's the difference between Asana and Atlassian?
I searched and found https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/comparison/jira-vs-asana but that's from Atlassian, probably a PR piece.
I am using Jira Software. Here's the link: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
Jira Software is built for every member of your software team to plan, track, and release great software. The ticketing system and commenting with all images links on one ticket just like post thread on forums.
So Jira is owned by the same people as Trello but is more software development focused, so you might look into them. Free for up to 10 users. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing
I'm using a plugin called "Automation for Jira" and working very well really in order to execute a jenkins job when an issue change for instance.
you can check also this link,
Jira is the best solution for creating custom workflows, transition rules and screens etc. It's mostly a developer tool but I am pretty sure it will work for you. It can be a little bit complex at first but you will like it. Also it has a free plan for up to ten users.
Take a look at Jira and Confluence. You can apply a lot of development methodologies to your everyday projects. Backlog, In Progress, Obstacle, etc. You can put your tasks into "Sprints" and "Releases", where the Releases have the due date. Tasks and Projects can have related pages in Confluence for documentation.
Another thing we did is move from time-based estimates to Story Points. Then we set a limit on how many points anybody can have in their Working category. Helps keep focus and prevents unrealistic timelines.
Example:
1 point = Up to 2 Hours or Minimal Effort or No Risk
2 points = Up to 4 Hours or Low Effort or Very Little Risk
3 points = Up to 12 Hours or Moderate Effort or Some Risk
(and so on)
Anything above X needs to be broken up into smaller tasks. You set what the X is.
The language may be drafted towards developers, but the same processes can apply to everyday IT. Our entire team has migrated to this structure - infrastructure, development, etc.
You can use Jira Service Desk for interfacing with the clients and managing their work. You can use automation, it has a portal and is very configurable in terms of internal work management processes (configure workflows, automate to add tasks/sub-tasks, etc).
You can also use Jira for managing the clients and their portfolios. Create a separate project for each client.
The self-hosted solution is very economical (host it on your own server and database).
You can also go with the free offering of Atlassian cloud (limited users/agents).
I havent seen an ARG creation specific tutorial or testimonial, but there are plenty for regular video games (indie games especially), and they mostly work the same in regards to the non-technical aspects (organizing work, vision, tests, etc).
If you work in a team, you could look into the numerous project management tools available. Many development companies (at least in europe) use Jira which is free for up to 10 users ( https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ ). It might be overkill for a single person project, but if the project is large enough then I think it could still be worth looking into.
For organizing the game/story itself I suggest you make a story board or something similar.
> How did you get the first step of your ARG out into the world?
In the world of video games, launch and promotion is easily half the battle. A good launch can save a bad game, and a bad launch can ruin a good game and prevent it from taking off. Most creators love creating the game/story, and dislike planning and figuring out the promotion, thus this part of making an ARG is almost always overlooked or ignored. There are no silver bullets here, because if there was, someone would have figured it out by now and everyone would do it. If you waited 5 years to do your ARG, include at least a couple of months figuring out the promotion before you launch. Dont let good work go to waste.
As far as I understand, the official Atlassian tool to do that is "Portfolio for Jira" https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/portfolio. I've used it on different missions, it's a very powerful tool, but also kind of tedious (you have to detail the team members availability precisely for instance), and there's a learning curve to account for as well. It'll definitely do the job, but might be overkill for what you need...