BUT! It has some amazing features and concepts that makes it for me the best project dev and collaboration tools if you keep simple and stupid! PMs just need to understand that they don’t have to use all the unnecessary features (or Agile dogmas!) like burn-downs, points, pipelines and locked sprint. Just focus on the Backlog (WBS Project plan hierarchy). Hansoft backlog with hierarchy and prioritized view is simply amazing and it will help you keep track of your scope and status.

If you want to try Hansoft, here are some tips to keep it simple :

1. Create a very clean backlog (I prefer to call it Project plan). Keep this project plan hierarchy as high level as possible (maximum 3 levels)
2. Delegate sections of the plan to Directors or team leads
3. Use Sprints for Code and Gantt for art
4. Let team members decide if they want to breakdown a backlog item in the sprint in sub task or use post-its
5. Do not ask the team members to update there hours. (who knows how much time it will take? Are you asking members from outsource studios to update their time?).

Note : The backlog items in Hansoft are assigned to the planning. They stays in the backlog. This is something that is important to understand. You work with a plan. Maybe other tools does that but I did not see one. ( MS Project gives you a plan but it’s not a collaborative real time tool).

Last thing about having the big picture. Team members complain that they don’t have access to it. Select an item from “myToDolist” Try Ctrl+G. It brings you to the item in the planning view. Ctrl+G again brings you in item in the backlog/project view allowing the user to see the other Scoped item status.

Jira is also very configurable, that must be why everyone just loves using it!
Thanks for your super constructive comment from an anonymous email address, “John.”
– Rob

Really? I’ve been using it since 2012 and it’s been great. I have tried others in the meantime, nothing is as configurable as Hansoft. I’m using custom workflows for items and it’s been great.

Of course it’s always a burden to populate the backlog and we stopped using it for a 1-2 years. When we got back to it everyone in the team was very happy.

There’s no human being who likes Hansoft? Seriously? What a trash article.

This post was written years ago. It’s possible Hansoft has improved, and there are definitely new applications available.

If you have a handful of people, I’d suggest Trello or GitHub. Even for larger teams it can work, if you are very rigorous about other aspects of your work (prioritization & issue culling, automated testing & code quality), but that’s a separate topic. I cannot in good faith recommend any heavyweight project management tools, you’ll have to do some more research.

But all in all it’s a useful tool. And I don’t agree with your ranting.

The generic team member would learn pretty fast how to handle his or her tasks in Hansoft.

And I don’t really understand the need for a physical board.

Hahaha, I laughed out loud and told that to some new friends. Brilliant :)

It’s not that bad, enjoy it with a tall glass of bleach all your problems melt away

I’ve spent the past seven months researching and writing about Lean and it always seem weird that so many people are trying to develop applications that assist in applying both Lean/Agile concepts, when this just introduces more wasteful activity, as you mentioned.

I’m a fan of physical boards, but I think that Asana meets a nice middle-ground to help track and prioritize both bugs and work processes.