In Search of the Perfect Project Management Tool

The market for project management tools, specifically those targeted at the software development industry, is in a very peculiar state nowadays. Every available solution is either lacking some rather critical features, or is cumbersome to use, or both. Basically this means that any newcomer that addresses all of the shortcomings of the existing products can easily grab a huge market share from the competitors.

This situation is similar to how the market of integrated development environments (IDEs) looked during the late 1990s, just before the arrival of IntelliJ IDEA. When the first version of JetBrains’ IDE came out, it instantly became a highly disruptive innovation that redefined both the market and the industry’s perception of an IDE as a product class. The sheer scale of this event was so great that Martin Fowler, a renowned industry guru, proclaimed that the world had entered “the post-IntelliJ era”.

So, what exactly is wrong with existing software project management tools? As it happens, there is actually no single answer to this question, because the market is so diverse.

Gantt Charts: Your Dad’s Project Management

On the high-ticket side of the spectrum, there are numerous “enterprise-y” product suites, usually marketed under the umbrella term “Application Life Cycle Management” (ALM)…