Using Clubhouse.IO for Project Management
Clubhouse.IO has made project management and day to day task tracking incredibly easy and fun.
We've recently gone through a major upgrade to our Elite 3E (time & billing) system. With hundreds of tests, multiple tasks, and many moving parts I cringed thinking about having to use & adhere to the PM's use of Excel sheets to keep track of percent complete, notes, external ticket references, re-runs of tests etc. Luckily our PM was open to trying something else which was more collaborative and provided better information to everyone without having to deal with checking in or out documents.
If words like Kanban and Agile are foreign to you, stop reading and watch Microsoft's Eric Brechner's 2015 Talks at Google video
I really wanted to like Taiga.IO which I installed and had up and running on premise quite quickly. It could do almost all the things I wanted, but it didn't feel right to me, but I still hold out hope for that one, particularly if there is a need to keep everything onsite. We also looked at Trello, Smartsheets (which was recommended by the external Project Management team), JetBrain's YouTrack, and a handful of other similar applications. In a very non-scientific approach I settled on Clubhouse.IO. I had used it briefly in another small project and knew that it had promise. As I dug into Clubhouse.IO further, I was blown away by it's rich feature set with respect to reports and filtering, reliability, ease of use, simplicity in design and overall fun clean feel. Then, as a developer, I dug into the API. Quite simply I can't remember ever seeing a more consistent and easy to use API. This is the API that I will now use as a model when developing anything. Do yourself a favour and give it a go.
At work, we're investigating Microsoft Teams and planner for similar needs. After using Clubhouse, the MS Planner just doesn't cut it. Like many of the other tools I evaluated, it does the job, but the implementation is no where near as polished as Clubhouse. Luckily, using Clubhouse's webhooks and Microsoft's Flow tool, I can almost keep Planner in sync and make it appear as if I've embraced it.
In addition to the points above, the support is world class and a stark contrast to some support channels I find myself in with expensive enterprise software. I had a couple of issues, one with the api on pagination which turned out to be a bug which was fixed with a day or so, and another where a wonky Microsoft Flow url hook was considered malformed by Clubhouse's webhook settings. Support in that latter case took the time to understand what I was trying to, agreed they need to address the url validator, but were also able to suggest a valid work around to get it to work immediately.
After trying out the free version for a month, we signed up for a monthly plan for about 10 users. To my delight, Clubhouse.IO drastically changed their pricing model saving us about $90/month as the price for 10 users dropped down to $10/month. There is no barrier there especially for smaller teams; if I had a larger team, I'd have no hesitation in recommending Clubhouse for project management or day to day task scheduling.