In my team, we report weekly on what we’re up to. Currently, this is a somewhat cumbersome arrangement of spreadsheets stored on our corporate OneDrive - we each fill out a new spreadsheet every week, detailing how many days we expect to spend working on each of of our projects, along with a brief status update for each, and save the resulting spreadsheet. Our team admin person then collates all of those reports, and compiles a single report.
The format of the spreadsheet we fill out is something like this:
We try to report up to six weeks in advance.
This is proving cumbersome, both for those of us filling out the spreadsheets (we have to do it while sat at our desks, and we’re a highly mobile team), and particularly for the admin person collating the data, so I’m looking for a better way. Ideally, we’d have the following requirements:
[ul]
[li]Web-based[/li][li]Easily updated from a mobile phone client app (Android / iOS)[/li][li]Easy to administer (i.e. adding / removing projects or team members)[/li][li]Easy to assign projects to a particular user[/li][li]Easy to produce reports detailing how many days each user expects to spend on each project, per week, for the next six weeks[/li][li]Doesn’t have to be free, but not exorbitantly expensive per-user[/li][li]Secure (I know I said ‘web based’ at the top of this list, but we are enthusiastic users of Enterprise OneDrive, and Box before it, so I don’t think Cloud is a blocker per-se)[/li][/ul]
We won’t really be using this tool to actually manage the projects; only to report on them.
You already have a license for MS O365 OneDrive. Upgrade that license for however many users to a small business SharePoint license. Then you have a variety of options at your disposal including a Project Site template that comes with all SP licenses. This will allow you to access the cloud based solution from mobile devices and given sufficient knowledge, customize the solution to your specifications.
I think Wrikemight be a good fit. It’s cheap, maybe free even. I don’t have much to say about it because our team utterly fails at working as a team but it might be the perfect fit for you.
We’re going through the same process at my work - we have so far tried a number of different solutions - some locally installed, some that run on an inhouse server or in the cloud. We haven’t found the right one yet, but ProjectFork is looking slightly promising - it’s a plugin for Joomla, which we happen to have running our new intranet, so trying it was an easy choice.
Fossil is a quick and easy bug tracker / project management software solution that also has the advantage of being the only one which has quick loadtimes for each page and a small footprint. Every other tracker system is a bloated mess of excess features and slow loading pages. On the other hand, because of it’s minimalist nature, some of the features you want will require someone who can do some HTML and write SQL queries. If you don’t have that, then never mind.
Fossil doesn’t support a “time estimate” field, but there’s instructions for how to add new fields to the database and HTML for the new fields:
Just create a task/ticket for each person, assign it to them when you want them to start, and then have them put an estimate in to the new field you’ve created. They can add their status as a new comment.
Here’s a definition of the database ticket tables, so you could make reports through a SQL query:
