I've used Jira's project management tools in conjunction with post-it notes to great success. At a very large company with lots of interdependent projects.

At the end of the day you don't need software if you have good managers (separate development managers and project managers if the product is big enough.) I've seen huge programs managed with nothing but Excel, Powerpoint and Post-It notes. You just have to retrain your executives to give you high-level vision and not try to micromanage it (I know, it's harder than it sounds.)

My current manager uses Excel and I don't have the slightest idea of what he's registering or communicating to anybody.

But, as you say, if he was a good manager, he would be communicating anyways.

If the management is not so good (or just not good at communicating?), I'd rather have a good management tool :)

Right; project management is really more about facilitating communication than anything else. Most projects have lots of domain experts who each have an idea of how things should be done. A good PM's job is to facilitate the conversations that need to happen to get everyone to agree on a plan, then communicate out the plan of record to everyone. This has the bonus factor of being able to peer-shame anyone who decides to deviate from the agreed-upon plan; which is helpful because in most organizations PMs have no real power to do anything.

And a management tool won't make a bad manager better, they'll manage just as badly through the tool. It can actually make things worse if you're the manager of a bunch of managers who all use the tool differently: your reports from the tool will be meaningless at best. That's why my preferred approach is to add project management to a workflow tool; not the other way around (e.g. we don't make development leads enter their tasks into MS Project, we put the project tracking info in Jira and manage it through there.) That way you can drive data consistency through process consistency and not piss off your developers by wasting time with multiple systems.

Took me ages to persuade my current manager to use Trello (based on this article https://community.uservoice.com/blog/trello-google-docs-prod...). Finally his response was "OK you win" sigh

Of note just because they use a pm tool, if they like keeping things close to their chest you can end up with a drip feed affect, with them only adding things to the tool when they think you are ready for new work.

This can then cause issues where the work they released needs further requirements capture....

I think the point of the article isn't that PM tools aren't useful, it's that they shouldn't be the focus especially of a new team starting out. When starting something new, it's easy to get bogged down in the how, rather than focusing on the why and the what. I think analyzing workflow and project management is more successful when you have already worked on a team for a while and realize where your strengths and weaknesses are, so you actually have data to use to determine what project flow might be more efficient.

I agree with you PM tools are useful:

1)If the projects are not finished at the deadline, we don’t have to blame the tool as you said.

2)Also Oren says that focusing is the key and gives us some advice. Ok.

I think he is right but maybe the head title doesn’t match a lot with the content.

“The light importance of PM in Startups (initial phases)” or “Startups: things to focus in before PMing” would be better. IMO.

BTW, awjr thanks for those tools and I sign up in SoftwareLeadWeekly , let’s see!