Bio Research-Oriented Project Management Solutions?

Question

[Adamc]

I was recently approached about suggesting possible project management solutions for the labs in our center. It doesn't seem that we need a whole lot in terms of features, so there's a chance that I'll end up developing something myself, but I've already got other projects, and it's always a good idea to see what's out there.

It seems most project management solutions now are oriented too much toward business or software development, and that anything targeted at bio is part of a LIMS. Additionally, I don't think they would approve of hosted systems, but would still like potential for collaboration. I think we'd be mostly looking at tracking people on projects, progress, and some reasonably simple reporting.

Anyone know of anything that might fit the bill? My searches so far haven't turned up a whole lot.

Answer 1

[Allpowerde]

We are using redmine. It was originally developed for software engineering projects but is so flexible that it is pretty easy to add a bio-spin to it. E.g. Bugs can easily be extended to manage custom items, like a flowcell (with organism, sequencing type, samples,...). Redmine has an active community so helpful plug-ins are readily available, for example

• a knowledge-base where institute-wide information (e.g. cluster-usage-guide) can be distributed in a wiki-style.
• users can prioritize their task from different projects and group-leaders can make suggestions

[Adamc]

Unfortunately our intranet group is only supporting .NET on their servers, and our department doesn't have our own server which would be appropriate for it at the moment.