Really simple task sharing / ticketing program

November 6, 2014 8:49 AM

I need a dead-simple task sharing / ticketing / to do list program for a small ad agency's creative team. About seven of us will be using it. When I say "simple" I mean "so simple that what I'm looking for might not even be marketed as a project management tool."

Basically all I need is:

1. I create an issue or a task and assign it to someone or bunch of someones
2. The people I've assigned it to have a central place where they can see everything that's been assigned to them.
3. When they finish a task, I'm alerted.

That's it. I don't need time tracking or workflow diagrams or project templates or commenting or file uploads or Github integration. Hell, even the third step is optional. I'm not saying that those features are an instant No, I'm just saying that those aren't things we're primarily looking for and if they make the system any more complicated to use I'm not interested.

We're on Macs, but a web app is fine, and probably preferred.

Candidates that won't work for various reasons:

• Wunderlist For Business looks like what we need, but at $50/user a year, it's too expensive to justify considering how simple their service is. I'm no internet cheapskate and I insist on paying for services that I find helpful, but c'mon...we pay less than that a year for our email and our accounting software combined.
• JIRA is about 1000x more complicated than what we need. And ugly.
• Basecamp looks like it's only about 100x more complicated than what we need, and I'm inclined to give it a shot, but it's even more expensive than Wunderlist and I'm not sure we'd use even 10% of what it offers.
• ProWorkFlow is something we already use for billing and I like it fine, but it's not agile and adding tasks is a pain. Plus, it's "owned" by Accounts, not Creative, and we need something that belongs to us.
• Slack is a lot of fun and we use it to swap animated GIFs and talk shit about the doofs down in Accounts, but it's not a project management tool. I'm only listing it here so someone doesn't suggest it.

posted by Ian A.T. to Computers & Internet (17 answers total)

I use Asana for basically this same purpose. It has commenting and file uploads and other fancy features, but they don't really complicate things at all. Also: free.
posted by cvp at 8:53 AM on November 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

Trello?
posted by jangie at 9:03 AM on November 6, 2014 [4 favorites]

There are a number of sites that feature free, no-login-required, on-line notepads. See here, for example. I've found these to be useful for doing quick, no-hassle collaborations, particularly if you're not overly concerned about security / confidentiality.
posted by alex1965 at 9:04 AM on November 6, 2014

Seconding Trello. I use it extensively for project management/task tracking.
posted by bitterpants at 9:06 AM on November 6, 2014

Do you have a file server? If so, why not just make a bunch of folders on it—one for each team member, plus a "Done" folder—then, to assign a task you would create a word processor file or a plain text file containing a description of the task and drag it into that person's folder. When they're finished, they'd drag it into the "Done" folder. You could keep the "Done" folder open, sorted by date accessed or something like that to see when new ones arrive, or if you wanted email or SMS notification there are a variety of ways you could have a new file appearing in the folder generate such a message.

If it needs to be web-based, many content management systems or wikis could do something equivalent, where the task is a new web page placed in a category, and with a RSS feed for notification set up on the "Done" category.
posted by XMLicious at 9:20 AM on November 6, 2014

Thirding Trello. We use it for the purpose you described, but also for various other bits and pieces.
posted by sektah at 9:38 AM on November 6, 2014

Trello is fantastic if you don't care at all about item 3. As you say, it's optional.

Trello is basically virtual post-it notes, so either way you can pretty easily see if a task is on someone's list or not. You'll probably be fine without alerts.


JIRA is about 1000x more complicated than what we need. And ugly.

YouTrack is the prettier, less complicated second cousin to JIRA. It may have way more features that you need, but it doesn't force them on you if you just want to ignore them.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 9:42 AM on November 6, 2014

ToDoist
posted by bleep at 9:43 AM on November 6, 2014

I was looking for something very similar (in terms of simplicity) for a small group, and found DropTask. Been using it for about a month now and we are happy with it so far - features are good and intuitive without being overwhelming, and customer service was helpful (no problems, just had some extra questions).

It has the first 2 things you've mentioned in a clear (and to me, pleasing) visual format. Not too sure about the updating-when-completed thing since we haven't needed it yet, but I think it has that feature as well.

They have a 30-day free trial for their "pro" version, which would allow you to test it out with 7 people and multiple projects... the free version allows only a limited amount of projects and participants.
posted by Pieprz at 10:18 AM on November 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

FWIW, @NSAID Trello does support subscribing to lists or cards, so moving a card to a 'done' list would probably suffice for the purpose of #3.
posted by jangie at 11:05 AM on November 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

Trello does support subscribing to lists or cards

I now need to rethink all my project management workflows.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 1:49 PM on November 6, 2014

Maybe Pivotal Tracker
posted by wintrymix at 3:42 PM on November 6, 2014

Response by poster: Thanks for all the answers, everyone!

Help me understand how you use Trello for project management, because I'll admit that even after watching three videos I'm not entirely sure I get how I'd use it to just share tasks with my team.

This is probably just my ignorance of the service talking, but it feels like it's zoomed out one level too many for what I need. What I mean is, we're a small team...I'm not assigning projects to people, I'm assigning little parts of projects (or in Trello terms, checklist items). But you can't assign checklist items to individual people and the devs seem pretty uninterested in supporting that.

I don't need to look at a board and see that my whole small team is assigned to every project we have (which would be the case). I need to see what tasks / checklist items are available in a specific project and what needs to be assigned. Clearly I'm wrong about it not supporting that, though, since lots of people have recommended it. What am I missing?
posted by Ian A.T. at 4:45 PM on November 6, 2014

Trello seems good because you could make a few cards for each person with the categories that you want, then share them with whoever. It's also relatively simple and flexible. I don't use anything but outlook for this sort of thing, so take my words with a grain of salt.
posted by oceanjesse at 5:36 PM on November 6, 2014

We use ASANA at work. It's easy and free.
posted by jennstra at 5:52 PM on November 6, 2014

@Ian A. T., I think that the organization strategy that I've had the most success with is to devote each board itself to a project, and have three columns, one for things yet to be done, one for things that are being done, and one for things that are done. Each card would be its own task [instead of a checklist item in and of itself]. Reading your response makes me feel like you want something that is more of a holistic view of your entire organization in one board, which doesn't sound like something that's really all that workable in Trello.

For what it's worth, at work we use JIRA, which is very much more complicated to use [and I assume, to setup] than Trello, but is also very good for what it is, in terms of managing a team across disparate projects and releases. I do enjoy Trello for things which are less structured and more fluid, and which don't have very detailed reporting needs.
posted by jangie at 6:00 PM on November 6, 2014

Response by poster: Just wanted to leave a final update for the nice folks in this thread and anyone who stumbles over this in the days to come.

We ended up going with Workflowy For Teams. Most of my team already love Workflowy, so I was overjoyed to discover that the folks over there offered a business service.

I have every project as a sub-bullet of their client bullet, and under that I just add tasks tagged with my employee's name. Like:

• Client
• Project
• Phase
• Hey do this thing @joe

All Joe needs to do is search (or click on) "@joe" and all the tasks that are assigned to him are displayed. We're also using hashtags sparingly, like #eod for projects that need to be done by end of the day. He can search "@joe #eod" and see his most important tasks for the day, and I can search just "#eod" to see our top priorities for the whole agency.

It's perfect, and exactly what I was looking for. Right now, the collaboration tools aren't that strong. (For example, I can't see who added a new bullet or who marked one as done. We get around that by just having me be the only person who adds or completes bullets. The team prefers it like that anyway.) However, I know this is something that they're strengthening, and I love the product as it is, and frankly they seem like great developers I want to give money to.

Thanks again for all your answers. I know that seems disingenuous since I went with a service not mentioned in the thread, but if it weren't for your suggestions I wouldn't have said to myself "I just want something that works like Workflowy, but for teams. Wait a minute, let me Google that!"
posted by Ian A.T. at 10:11 AM on November 14, 2014