I deployed a Redmine installation yesterday and today I try to fill it with some relevant data. One issue I came across is the organization of projects itself. While I took a look at how Redmine itself uses parts of the software, they unfortunately have only one project set up and I haven’t seen any other examples. I know that this is heavily tied to your workflow, but seeing / reading about some examples would guide me to the right path.
We are two guys (a designer & developer, both of us do also other stuff like marketing or paperwork) and we have more than 20 projects that I want to map to Redmine. Less than a handful of projects are active at the same time and they aren’t specifically related. However, we want to see how much time we spent on all projects and also see the overall project situation, i.e. should we start another project or add this or that to the current one or won’t this be doable for such a small team?
At the moment I tend to have one of these setups:
- A company project and all of our real projects organized as subprojects.
- Separate Redmine projects for each of our projects, and eventually subprojects for broader functionality if needed (sync support for app xyz).
The problems I see with the first approach is that the projects aren’t necessarily related to each other. They may share a common framework which is a project for itself, but otherwise they are really separate things. All of them are software projects, so they share common metaphors like Trackers, though. I haven’t seen a way to separate versions. The roadmap would be an overview of the current work situation, but it could get pretty confusing. My biggest fear is that we will have endless drop down lists with unrelated things like versions from other projects.
The second approach seems to be saner, but my biggest fear is that we won’t have the general overview. We would have to look at all other roadmaps to plan the current one, we wouldn’t see just one calendar with things to do in all projects.
I think the core of the problem is that we have very limited human resources that have to be shared across a lot of projects, but they mustn’t overlap. Any ideas how this can be mapped to Redmine?
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I would go with the second approach.
In my company we are two guys as well, and also use Redmine. We have a separate Redmine project for each project, and Redmine subproject when it has to be. We also have one or two Redmine projects for server/applications management (using the wiki project for documentation).
So, our solution is your second approach and we work confortable, but we dont have 20 projects…
There are a lot of 3rd party plugins, may be you can find some plugins for a general overview that you are confortable with.
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The second approach seems to the way to go. I missed that one can view all issues on all projects and then use the sidebar to show an overall calendar & Gantt chart.
The only thing I’ll have to check is if some of the charts plugins support cross-projects statistics, too. Most plugins look like they are awfully outdated.
It’s overwhelming how flexible Redmine (or most other related software) is at the beginning, but it’s also good to know that it can grow with your requirements.