Simple, Succinct, and Agile Project Management Tool

Item: Redmine
Rating: 8
Author: Ashley Lee

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Redmine across our organization between different departments. Initially, it was only used internally between sales, engineering, and project management teams. When we got more involved with certain customers and more back-and-forth was becoming cumbersome in emails, we moved the customers to start using the ticketing systems to alert us to any issues and keep track of their feature developments through transparency offered in Redmine tickets.

Major Use-Cases:

Priority assignments for developers .
Internal organization for resource management.
Communication between customer and project manager for status updates.
Quick reference for past issues.

Pros and Cons

Easy to upgrade and or change to your own particular use-cases.
Straightforward set-up and easy to create custom fields and workflows.
Communication between multiple teams.
Track multiple sprints through their chart views.
Keep a historical record of changes done to instances.

More flexibility for when fields are mandatory by type of user.
Create drag and drop updates in the list views for easy re-ordering of to-do-lists.
More ready-made analytics on time spent.

Return on Investment

Customers receive updates on all progress made for their issues -- this results in an informed customer who is being given transparency on all steps of our process.
Customers have responded well from being able to not have to track down emails and instead come to a central place for requests.

Alternatives Considered

Basecamp

Basecamp was very busy and seemed more into the "wow" factor than into being an efficient tool. Redmine has none of the characters or kid-like appearance of Basecamp's model. I found Basecamp to be too cluttered in views and its interactions confusing, making it difficult to find where centrally kept information was.

Redmine has a straightforward no-nonsense default UI, though you can change it how you like of course. The views were designed for simplicity and thinking of the least amount of steps to get to one goal instead of trying to make a pleasing color palette that was overstimulating. I think Basecamp is more geared towards the "chat" aspect whereas Redmine is good for the larger overview of a project.

Other Software Used

Slack, Pingdom, Twilio SendGrid Email API

Likelihood to Recommend

For us specifically, we are a Ruby on Rails team, so customizing Redmine was easy to make it suit our needs. If we've needed different configurations for views, we developed it internally and updated our instance. I think Redmine does a great job in making known what feature requests are out there and which will be included in newer updates. The fact that we get to use it for free is a huge plus obviously. It does a great job with basic tracking of jobs that need to be done and assignment of teams who will need to be involved. It creates a great collection of comments, information, and feedback for future issues. We use Redmine also as a repository of historical changes per-client, so that we have a complete detailed record of all the requests made by the client for transparency on our control for them. We never deploy anything without approval from the client to production, and so we gain that information through updates in Redmine, and we have that record if we ever need to look back to it.

Overall Satisfaction with Redmine