Currently, partly based on my experiences both as a project manager and a developer, I started writing a piece of software that hopefully, at some point, will make my life a lot easier (and would be useful to other people as well). The project is called pm360. 360° comes from advertising business. It means that a product is being promoted by single agency using all possible means: TV, publishing, new media, buzz marketing, PR, BSR etc. That is, it combines multiple activities into a single process that is possible to handle by an interdisciplinary team.
What I want to achieve is a unified platform for customers and development teams that enables instant communication of requirements and simplifies work flow through the whole life cycle of a Web software product. Let’s say, a mix of a customer service support, help desk, bug tracking and purely project management functionality. All that given in a nice packaging and easy to deploy.
There’s no rush with this project. I want to make it state of the art in terms of development, collect various experiences and thoughts, analyze weaknesses and strengths of the companies I worked for and try to find solutions to most common problems. If you have any ideas on how the perfect application of that kind may look like, what functionality would you expect, and what issues you come across on a daily basis that could be used for modeling this piece of software, please let me know – after all, the goal is to create something useful.
In the meantime, I’m putting some notes, diagrams and all the other stuff on a temporary homepage at http://webcookies.org/pm360/ (suspended, lack of time…). Feel free to have a look!