![]() If it wasn’t written down, it might even be forgotten by the manager and CEO, too. Executives can have a conversation about a new feature that will give you an advantage over your competitors, but if the manager does not express this to the rest of the team, it won’t happen. However, sometimes these changes are not being communicated to all team members. Regardless of how well the initial plan was drafted, there is always a good chance it will need to change. In this context, we should think of software as a living being. Maybe your goals and requirements keep evolving as you work on the project. Maybe you’re working at a startup and you have pivoted more than a couple of times. One of the biggest issues facing teams that don’t use a project management tool is caused by the intrinsic nature of software. ![]() From a collaborative perspective, this can make a huge difference, as project management tools enable everyone to access and view all segments and stages of the project, reducing the need for constant communication and updates. Project management tools solve this by having one stream of conversation dedicated to each issue, making your life easier, as they allow you to find everything you need (designs, APIs, and feedback) in a single click. Most email conversations touched multiple issues which made it harder and harder to keep track of what was left to be done. Also, communication about a single issue becomes a puzzle broken into different pieces living in different email conversations. People used multiple emails for communicating, so it was hard to keep track of different threads. A client of mine did that on a project I worked on a few months ago, and it was a nightmare. You may be thinking you can get the same results simply by collaborating via email or other communication channels. PMTs also provide more information and visibility to all team members, allowing them to track the progress of other team members and plan their activities accordingly. Of course, it is not merely about communication between individual members of a distributed team. Project management tools help make such collaborative processes easier because they become an official (and, for practical reasons, sometimes the only) channel for team members to communicate their needs back and forth. ![]() There are also scenarios in which you might not be able to talk to the other developer more than once or twice per week. Time zones become a real issue when you are trying to get a colleague to fix or modify some part of the system in which you’re not sufficiently proficient. On most projects, I find myself working for people around the globe, and while that’s really awesome, it also poses a range of challenges that an office team won’t be facing. Can’t developers just create software without them? The answer is that it depends on multiple factors, so let’s analyze some of them. When I was starting out, most of my projects didn’t rely on a project management tool, so you might be asking if you really need one. ![]() Hopefully, this article will help decision-makers and developers figure out what is most convenient for them, their team, and the project they are working on. I am not going to give you a sales pitch for one specific tool today, but rather, I’m going to give you an inside view from a developer’s perspective of how these tools are used in real life as well as an overview of two representative tools. Over the past year, I’ve worked on a dozen projects and almost all of them used a project management tool (PMT). Also, UI/UX has become a very important issue as the competition for capturing new users and retaining the current ones’ increases. Software has become more and more complex, with distributed teams literally all around the globe, and reliant on people specialized only in a specific part of the process. Software production today isn’t the same as 20 years ago.
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