JIRA is terrible in my opinion but has evolved and many (most?) small, medium and big software houses use it.

There are more alternatives than I can count did you look elsewhere? For some reason people continue using JIRA and investing time and money on it. JIRA has an awful interface, is unnecessarily complicated, has a learning curve (when it shouldn't) and you actually need to know SQL in order to create helpful views for trivial things (e.g. have a proper view of hours/projects worked per week).

The earlier versions (3.x) were simpler, yet still customizable, and great for a lot of tasks.

The only easy to use and reasonable tool is trello. You can keep a list of tasks but it's not very practical to see who's doing what.

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A good practise is to request people (not just developers) to send a weekly email to manager(s). (Keep it concise AND bullet points MUST be understandable by anyone NOT familiar with their projects).

   Major news: single line (if any)

   Done: ...

   Next week: ...

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And then. Have each team make a google doc. Write down goals/targets for the next month(s) and who's responsible for executing it.

Teams update the document once a month and email it company wide, open to comments.

I think I can help with this. If you're interested in getting better visibility on what projects are in-flight and who's working on what, send me an email [email protected]

I'd be happy to send you an invite for our private beta. Think of it as a blend between Slack and Jira.

I'd love to hear about various solutions for this as well. So many tools are so heavy weight, and others are too lightweight.. and everyone ends up with something JIRA/Bugzilla + spreadsheets and reports.

Agreed. One thought I had was to just toss project names into Trello columns and move people around as a starting point for management.

Don't be afraid to do the next least janky thing. Run with it. It's like David Allen with GTD:

If you can't do it with paper, you don't understand your process enough yet.

A manual process that is well understood can be well automated, an undefined process will struggle as automating something while also defining something always ends being a huge long project. If you can mentally model how to do it in trello, then do it, and come back to the automation step once you see it working (they have an API, you can get there).

Good luck!

Have a look at Odoo, it integrates all you need in a single software: project management, forecast/resource planning, timesheet, bug tracker, integration with github, communication tools, ... (as well as integration with sales and billing/accounting):

https://www.odoo.com

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Odoo

Are you talking about the process of assigning tasks for people to complete, having visibility into what is currently being worked on, or having visibility into what was done recently? Or some combination of the three?

I'm guessing you not talking strictly about organizing the tasks and projects themselves since there are a million tools for that.

More than anything the DOO probably just needs to learn how to do their job, communicate with people, and use the tools we already have. But yes -- not necessarily high fidelity within a project. More like "Because of funding on X you will be moving to work with Tanya on February 27. The program manager is Harvey and you will be allocating your time to account #777." And then based on that sort of information having a matrix or GANTT chart of which employees are charging where and which project. Perhaps the organization is just dysfunctional and no tool will solve the problem.

I recently started using WakaTime myself, with plans to integrate with Xero some weekend. I just need an intermediate interface to adjust invoice labels and review billable time. Something similar could work for internal projects - maybe try to get an on-prem WT instance.