When I first began working for an SME utility contractor, documentation throughout the company was virtually non-existent outside of some shared network excel files. I was working on 2 very important projects, one a waterfall project and the other a highly agile technical project. I needed a way to document my project plans, controls, and lessons learned. I also realized that getting the rest of the 20 or so office employees on the same page was vital to the company’s long-term success. I approached the VP of Operations to discuss adding project management software to the company, and not just for my projects, but as a sharepoint system for the entire company. We discussed different types of project management software and ended up deciding that Redmine project management software was the best choice for our company at that point. With the help of the data systems teams I was able to push for an in-network server installation of Redmine using nothing but the basic free software package.
After testing out the Redmine system on my own projects for a couple of months, and loving the results, we decided to rollout the project management software to the rest of the company. Some users (like the sales staff) would have read only access to sales related content. Other users (like the shipping manager) would have limited access to just shipping and inventory operation tasks and issues, so that they could do some data alterations on projects and processes relevant to their jobs. Other users like management were able to utilize the entire array of options and features provided by Redmine to help better run the company. The Redmine software also included GANTT chart capabilities and wiki pages for each project.
All the while this implementation of Redmine was occurring I was also pushing for, and personally utilizing Trello Kanban board software. This software became an integral part of my ERP adoption project since the ERP transition project was highly agile in nature. I proactively went out and obtained the system, registered the application, and began utilizing it in-house on multiple projects to help create a backlog, to help prioritize that backlog, to assign tasks to users, all the while utilizing Kanban in process limits in the Kanban pull system I implemented.