25.11.2019 21:22

Why does collaboration software suck? Q&A with Tony Bibbs, President, GForge. Read it in ElectronicsWorld Magazine,

Q:       What do you see in the collaboration software space today?

A:        The collaboration space has no shortage of options: Today’s solutions come in different flavours of software as a service (SaaS), on-premises or hybrid, all promising that a few mouse clicks will help you collaborate better. However, the one attribute most of them have in common is they don’t all deliver what they promise. In fact, many of these solutions actually make collaboration worse.

Q:       What are the most common problems with today’s collaboration solutions?

A:        When business grows so do its needs. Although transition happens slowly, before you know it, you’ve accrued many individual solutions, each addressing only a single task. Even worse, navigating between all those tools becomes painful, as it often does. In the best case, these features add more buttons to an already-complicated user interface; in the worst, there are many more bookmarks to get to the specific features. 

Lack of a comprehensive feature-set makes portfolio management difficult, if not impossible. Some solutions focus on work (tickets, issues, tasks), some on the process (kanbans, CI/CD integration), and others on people (chat). But, what about the bigger picture? How many projects do we have in flight and what’s their relative health? Have we spread our valued team members too thin? How do I find quickly what I’m looking for? Can I easily and successfully search for what I need (projects, users, tickets, documents)? Centralised searching isn’t something you can do without but will require buying yet another tool.

Then, there are the projects themselves: not all are created equal! In a world where organisations have dozens or even hundreds of projects in various phases of development, support and retirement, it’s important to be able to scale features up or down, without having to buy more seats or new solutions.

Then, there’s the ‘SaaS/Cloud versus on-premises’ discussion. There’s no shortage of on-premises solutions, yet many require painful, complex installation and upgrade processes. Given the critical role collaboration solutions play, getting them up and running (and keeping them up to date) needs to be easy. Many of these solutions can’t be even installed without an Internet connection, which means installing a collaboration solution on your super-secure network will be difficult, if not impossible.

And, once you are up and running, how do you control access to your projects?

Access control varies greatly between collaboration solutions. Large projects often have large teams, with technical, management and stakeholder members, each playing a role in successful delivery. Believe it or not, some collaboration solutions don’t allow you to define your own roles, instead imposing a set of roles, often giving users access to either too many or too few features.

Roles are key in any real collaboration solution and are often reusable, specifying the level of access users have. And even if you can specify roles on your project, if you’ve been upsold you may well be stuck having to manage access to each upsold feature separately. This is where the tools start to run the team. What started out as only a simple solution soon includes a wiki, chat, help desk and next thing you know, you are looking at a bunch of tools, held together with duct tape and web hooks, none being the authoritative source of your precious project data, and all individually imposing different ways of working.

Read the entire article at ElectrornicsWorld Magazine - https://www.electronicsworld.co.uk/qa-with-tony-bibbs-president-gforge-who-discusses-the-current-state-of-project-and-collaboration-software/15617/