Fogbugz is simple, flexible and easy to maintain. Great for SMB's, not great for large organizations.
Rating: 9 out of 10
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We are currently using Fogbugz for our internal Production, Development, and Project Management teams. It is serves as a light weight task management system to move/track jobs between departments. it is effectively a virtual job jacket for our creative agency. We introduced the tool to support our teams with tracking fast moving jobs and keeping individuals accountable for responsibilities for a given job. It also helps team member transitions and coverage by showing a quick summary of the job history.
We selected the tool for it's simplicity, flexibility and ease of management because it would be used company wide accommodating varying experience levels of task management literacy.
We selected the tool for it's simplicity, flexibility and ease of management because it would be used company wide accommodating varying experience levels of task management literacy.
Pros
- Simplicity: Compared to other tools like Jira and even Bugzilla, Fogbugz minimizes the number of fields. The general workflow and status' of a given task works well for us. (Assigned, Resolved, and Closed).
- Flexibility: The list views are highly customizable. This allows for many ways to display information and create custom lists for teams and departments. It has prebuilt queries, and basic boolean syntax that you can stitch together to build a list.
- Easy to maintain: There are just two types of access rights. Regular and Admin. With some training, administration of the tool is done by project managers and a general user admin. We have a self hosted version, so there is an IT component in our maintenance, but it does not requires much attention.
Cons
- The simplicity of a single admin type user is not great because anyone who can create a job or client in the system, can also add and delete users. Content and User administrative rights should be separated.
- There are ways to change the terminology/lexicon within the tool, but we are not able to get it to work even after reaching out to tech support. So we are forced to use the system terminology that doesn't match up to our company making training a bit difficult.
- There is a subscribe function that you can opt into, there should be a way to add subscribers as you create a new task.
Likelihood to Recommend
Do you have trouble keeping track of work in progress?
Do your jobs jump around alot and often sit idle?
Are there process bottlenecks where better access to job/task transparency will help move a job along better?
Are there common issues related to coverage and you find yourself digging through emails to figure out job status?
Do your jobs jump around alot and often sit idle?
Are there process bottlenecks where better access to job/task transparency will help move a job along better?
Are there common issues related to coverage and you find yourself digging through emails to figure out job status?