Implementation Plan Execution Software

Question

At work we currently utilize excel spread sheets as implementation plans (moving a new release code to integration or production). The plan includes this information:

• Title
• Description (task information, what needs to be done)
• Owner (team and individual)
• Date
• Time
• Notes

I am looking for a tool that can manage this content and provide the following additional abilities.

• Update the plan ("Hey I finished my task") via the web, simple browser GUI
• RBAC/Integration with Active Directory
• Dependency links, for example TA123 cannot be executed until TA119 is complete. This should keep the user from marking things complete early, which if nothing else would notify them if they did something early.
• Push notification (Managers tracking dont have to refresh, they can just have a dash board up.
• Copy projects, create a gold copy of a plan and then create copies when executing a certain date/environment.
• Effective API for linking to other web based applications

Answer 1

I'm also interested if there are better solutions to this problem, but in my company recently there was an installation of JIRA with quite a few add-ons for similar purposes, namely:

• It is web-based
• Dependencies and default workflow of projects/issues can be defined
• Tempo planner helps with the deadline organization
• There is a fair level of customization to the dashboards used, so there may be some AJAX-based real-time ones
• A lot of methods are exposed via web RESTful API.

I'm not aware of any Active Directory-related functionality/addons.

Anyway, JIRA has quite a few uses/addons, so you may find it an upgrade from Excel spreadsheets :)

Answer 2

Tuleap might be worth a look. I didn't use it in a production environment yet, but I just started an evaluation phase.

It fulfils your requirements like this (links to the website):

• Tuleap has LDAP authentication
• It does agile planning supporting parent-child dependencies (possibly not 100% what you want)
• Tasks are assigned to persons (screenshot)
• Tasks can have dates in traditional project management also supporting a parent-child relationship
• It has a customizable "My personal page" dashboard which supports notifications, but I could only find email notification settings until now.
• It has a SOAP API

I'm not sure whether it can copy a project. You can't do it by "Project Data Export". Perhaps it's just disabled in the online demo. I could also not create new projects yet.

One of the main features for me: it is free and open-source.

There is a free demo, just press one of the Play-buttons. That's what I currently use before I grab the appliance.