Research

When planning our design for our system we had to do research on existing project management tools such as Jira, Spice Works, Monday.com and many more. What we focused on when we looked at these systems were the following features:

• How did they track tasks and issues?
• How did they allow for customization?
• How did they cater for collaboration?
• How did they keep track of performance?
• How did they automate certain things?

By looking at how these features were executed we had a basic understanding of what was needed from our system. More importantly we looked at where these features were falling short of being the best, and how we could improve and use them in our system to be the best.

How did they track tasks and issues? In Jira users can create issues, choose workflows, assign tasks to users, set priorities for issues and provide updates via comments and such. We asked ourselves how can we make this better. What we did was we looked at making priorities customizable for each project. This means that for each project the client can decided how long before the deadline different priorities were, i.e. low = 2 weeks, medium = 1 week, high = 5 days, critical = 24 hours. This was not something we found you were able to do on the other system.

How did they allow for customization? Jira allowed for customization in the following ways:

• Issues and workflows
• Fields and Attributes
• Screens and Forms
• Permissions and Access Controls What we realized was that it lacked a more personal customization like user profile customization. Allowing users to customize things on their profiles like their picture, background image, bio, relevant links (LinkedIn, Git, etc.)

How did they cater for collaboration? Jira made use of concepts like comments, activity feeds, notifications, Attachments, email notifications, etc. This we felt they did very well and only required one major improvement. We wanted our system to not only cater for collaboration amongst team members on a project but collaboration between the client and the team lead. To do this we incorporated a video chat system that allowed clients to call one of our available consultants in the event that their designated project lead is unavailable.

How did they keep track of performance? Jira executed the concept of performance tracking very well. Their performance tracking was very detailed but when we asked people who use Jira they mentioned that it was a bit overwhelming and confusing at times. So what we did was we made a more user friendly version that still kept important metrics like burndown charts, time to first response, overdue tickets, etc.

How did they automate certain things? Jira made use of email automation. This is a good feature but we felt our system could use a bit more automation. We achieved this by using AI to automate the creation of to do's based on the users description of the ticket. The user still maintains the ability to make their own custom to do's but if they feel that they can't create clear and precise to do's then the AI tool is there to assist them.