For a bunch of reasons, I’ve decided to make a project management system from the ground up. The two most important reasons are The Axe’s current system is just way overkill for us, and I needed an excuse to go balls deep back into working with Rails.
Currently at The Axe, we use ActiveCollab. AC is pretty awesome in most ways and can handle some pretty major needs, it’s just way more than we need. It’s pretty complicated to just get right into the info that you need to access super quickly – at least the way we use it. To benefit us most, it would almost have to work like a fancier version of a forum or some type of threaded conversation kinda like the comments on Band Job projects. It’s just gotta be easy to get in there, grab what you need, say what you gotta say, and get back to work.
As far as I know right now, I’m going to be building it in 3 major steps:
- Make it work for our internal use
- Make client access for clients to be able to see their project in progress and make any comments right in the app
- Make it handle invoicing and billing.
I’m not really planning on building it for public release or anything like that, but I suppose if some people show interest in it, that can change.
I’m going to use my blog to keep up with the progress of the whole thing and maybe talk about some things I learn along the way.
