Topic: Project management software

Happy (almost) new year to all you mad scientists out there. For the last few months I've been evaluating several project management software packages to find one that's "Just Right" for my current job. Here's a little background:

I'm the Lead UX/IA Designer for a 22 person website-and-software design & development project. We're contractors and we're working for a fairly large US Federal Agency in DC that services about 500-600 people internally. We've designed/maintained about 80 websites and about 14 small to enterprise scale web-based applications on top of that. While we're "technically" a C#.NET shop (currently using 2.0 Framework), we do some PHP and Java development.

Yeah... ok. Anyway, like I said above I've been evaluating COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software for project management for the last few months and it's been a real pain trying to find "just right" packages. Basically, I'm looking for something that has:

• The ability to create "tickets" which can be used to assign individual work tasks to individual developers or groups of developers. The tickets must also be able to handle multiple iterations of changes and hold onto conversations between the developer and the requester.
  
  
• Should have the ability to support 10+ "projects", as well as have hierarchical categorization for projects and tasks.
  
  
• Must be able to handle over 250 users.
  
  
• Must have a built-in, modifiable workflow.
  
  
• The ability to generate metrics based on input/output, open/close rate, iterations, length of ticket life, etc.
  
  
• Web-based interface.
  
  
• Must be enterprise level and hosted on-site (NOT off-site like Basecamp).

I know it seems like a lot of stuff but it's really not. I've evaluated large and small packages like Jira, RightNow Web, MS Project, Merant PVCS Tracker. We're currently using an old version of PVCS Tracker and it's just not cutting it. My developers didn't like Jira, nor did my clients. RightNow Web was the closest I've found to what we're looking for but our clients balked at the $40k+ price tag.

Any help you could offer would be most appreciated.

Thanks much.

- Scott

Jira meets all your stated requirements - what's the problem?

My advice: if you're serious about it then pick one, make sure it's easily expandable, stick with it and be prepared to spend lots of money. Get a consultant who knows the tool. Dedicate 1-2 people to maintenance and development.

The alternative: pick something cheap and live with the limitations.

Alternative: make your own that's awesome!

Jira *does* meet most of our needs, however, the clients (the Feds) do not like it. Quotes from the demo included, "It's clunky and hard to understand or navigate," and "Well, I'm sure that the developers will be able to use it but it doesn't look like something we could use out of the box."

That is to say... the Feds we work for are looking for a system that does all of that but looks, well, prettier. They also weren't enthused about the fact that Atlassian doesn't provide on-site support (something that I've tried to convince them isn't necessary but they're from the old school where everything has an on-site support contract...).

Believe me, this is not the first time I've had to go and pick enterprise-level software applications here and they all go like this. That's working with the government.

As for making our own PM software, we've made attempts at doing that before. Because the clients are vague with details on what they're looking for outside of the standard features, and because we spent a full-year developing our own .NET framework with complex user & role relationships we're looking to use a COTS package this time to save some time and get a better ROI (one year of 6 peoples full-time development costs != good ROI when you can buy something off the shelf for under $20k and implement it in less than a month with 1-2 people focused on the admin side).

- Scott