Open Lab has been using Teamwork since 2002. Today our production manager comes to us (the Teamwork's development group) and she tells us "with the accounting guys we verified the 2007 budgets and project costs with Teamwork, and it worked like a charm". Now there was a distinctive surprised tone in her voice, which we surely didn't appreciate. We just grunted some noise, and went back to coding.

I remember summers when I was a child in England, watching McEnroe on TV. So when I see the project management solutions people consider, it just comes to my mind; “You can’t be serious, man!”. I mean, it’s incredible what commercials get to sell to customers. Some companies really believe that they can have projects and work data on a third party on-line service? I mean, a company with more than two people can take that? And you can accept not to have such data on your database? I mean, no access but through that closed-source web based software? Online services and software houses come and go. You also should have some familiar way to talk and question such data. Add pages, reports, whatever to the application. I mean, we are not talking about an mp3 player, which just has to play mp3s (and even there, you may want more); its your company's data!

You really believe that issue-tracking is all you need for managing software development? Nowhere today software is made only by developers.

I understand that our competitors have stronger marketing means. But believing such stuff.. you can’t be serious, man!
Pietro Polsinelli

P.S. A friend remarked: "In your line, to be serious you'd need a custom solution!". Well, yes: what we try to supply with Teamwork is as close as possible to a custom solution, at the price of a schrink-wrapped one...

Labels: real project management

Teamwork is popular in Sweden. Roberto and myself also just been there to do some integration development, and it was a very nice experience: we worked with a team 50% Swedish, 50% Pakistan and Indian, and they seem to make a nice group. We mapped the default task structure and their ISO certification roles in Teamwork, seeing how this can be used in Scrum sprints. We created an additional web part "your responsibilities", to evidence the ISO roles, and improved the "my issues" one, for issue-based developers. Many friendly features forthcoming in 3.2.3 release!

Pietro Polsinelli

Due to our expanding market, in Open Lab there are the following open positions: