The struggles of choosing project management software

As any good team should, my team planned from the beginning to use a project management software to manage scheduling, assigning tasks and sprints. We all had experience with Jira, but initially decided not to use it simply because of how complicated it can get. Jira can seem really scary. especially from my perspective as the project manager. So we all decided to use Notion instead. It seemed perfect! It was simpler and more visual, so much less scary than Jira. That was until we ran into problems.

Where Notion was good was it was easy to enter information and see how things worked. It was better that Trello because it had enough detail for us to break tasks into features, but also seemed better than Jira because it didn't have a bunch of stuff we didn't need. It was simple an organised with just enough information for us to get our jobs done.

Where it was bad though was when they started to ask for money. Money that we don't have as students. We found that we were unable to even put in all the tasks we needed unless we upgraded to "plus" plan, where each member of the team would have to pay 10 dollars a month.

 This wasn't feasible. So we had to go back to the drawing board.

We looked at our options again. Notion was out, so it was either gonna be trello or Jira. 

Trello still seemed less scary than Jira. Very visual and very simple. But, we found, it's possible for things to be too simple. Especially for a multi-month long project, Trello simply couldn't divide up tasks enough for it to be feasible. So we were stuck with Jira.

We started using Jira, and honestly, there weren't as many hiccups as we expected! It's still a little scary, and there is a lot to get used to, but it gets the job done. And at the end of the day, that's what matter the most. We filled the backlog with all our tasks and started our first sprint.

Now we have a clear plan for the future, and things are finally going smoothly!