What features that every project management tools should have?

Almost everyone working in an Agile Team would know about Atlassian and JIRA. At least would have heard about it. Recently, one of my friends introduced me to Monday.com. While exploring it, I thought to list the features I would value in my project management tools.

Sivasathivel Kandasamy
3 min readDec 14, 2021

Project Idea flow

Mostly the project is conceived from organization goals. These goals drive the requirements and their grouping.

In each of the stage, documents/contracts are created. These documents need to be organized and be linked to the actual work done to effectively manage projects

My Expectations

The features I look forward in my project managements tools include:

  • There are a lot of documents created in the process of a product development from Roadmap to documentations need to support the applications, including training users. The tools should identify gaps in documentations
  • These documents must be organized in an hierarchical fashion
  • Any document should be able to indicate its parent and children. For example, by looking at a document of an Initiative one should easily be able to understand, why it is created (Specific goal in a theme) and how it is approached (Epics)
  • There should be access control on these documents. Who can access what document, their level of access, when they access it and why?
  • There should be a seamless integration between the documents and GIT (bitbucket/github). Usually, an Epic would be represented by a Repository, in the GIT.
  • Usually, User Stories represent a single requirement from a user perspective. The GIT integration should let automatically create a branch in the GIT repo of the Epic, the User Story belongs to.
  • The User Stories, Tasks and Sub Tasks constitute the Backlog and are represented by appropriate branches in GIT
  • The backlogs are picked during the sprints and the status should be tracked through a Workflow Engine which automatically updates the status in all the required documents. Therefore by looking at a document, one should see the status of all its children.
  • Any Commits/Pull Request from to the branches are to trigger a review — code review, security review, etc. Some of these reviews may be automated and should be automated.
  • Once the changes are accepted the statuses are accordingly updated in all concerned items.
  • At the same time, the project management tools should provide an understanding on the Teams velocity, capacity, etc. that helps stakeholders understand the progress as well as in capacity planning.
  • The GIT should also be integrated with some CI/CD tools like JENKINS.
  • In additions, the toolsets should provide a easy means of managing Change Requests, L3 Tickets, as well as have a support and integrate with DevOPs tools.
  • I also prefer the UI to be intuitive and has a very small learning curve.
  • I would be nice to have them as a ready-made solution or at least easy to follow tutorials for integrations

Disclaimer: This is my personal views, but I would like to hear from you.

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