ZenTao: Best DMS tool and more

As a big fan of ZenTao , I have understand in my practice that ZenTao is appropriate to manage Scrum development but not limited to it.

ZenTao is a complete professional Application Lifecycle Management tool.

Then I realize immediately that ZenTao is appropriate for webmasters, bloggers and publishers who maintain a website. ZenTao is not necessary only for development. In this case  that the QA module is not used, neither are plan, builds,  releases, etc... But stories, tasks, projects and products are quite usable. And the Doc module too.

ZenTao VS other management tools

In my work in mainframe industry, developing in COBOL, we are trying to do Scrum and we have worked with:

Jira Software is expensive and very complex and the roles are not clearly identified. You can set parameters for everything and then it becomes very complex. Sometimes, people prefer Trello because it is simple and you don't have to set "a million" parameters. However, Trello has cons, because it is too simple and you can not use it for project management. ZenTao is quite right. It has just the right number of parameters necessary to do a specific work. So you understand it immediately if it's your work. If you know a little of AGILE method you understand product, project, sprint, story, task and you understand immediately the help ZenTao can bring to you.

If you work in the construction of houses, you have no need to use a hammer that can be transformed in multiple forms. You just need to use a hammer. Period.

Quality Center is complex and it takes a lot of time to use it properly. Teams have no time to use it properly so Quality Center is often used to transmit testing documents from one team to another and is not really used for test requests. It become a giant tool to do very simple things. Some company use it like a DMS Tool.

More than a tool just for development projects

And now I realize ZenTao can be adapted for every kind of projects with just minimum changes.

If you imagine a V-Model Project a Scrum Project with only 1 iteration and a sprint duration of 1 or 2 years, you can use ZenTao to manage it. There is just a lack in the analyze phase. But to be scrum, it must be simple and reactive, short and quick.

For all projects, you have requirements and constraints. But sometime you have new requirements and constraints that appear during the implementation of the project. Then, you have just to analyze and give new rules to integrate in new stories, link to a sprint, and made new single tasks to respect these new requirements and new constraints, which is not a problem, really.

For webmasters and publishers, there are not such need. You can use ZenTao without the QA module. But when you get a new customer to develop a new website, you have to take notes of what your customer tells you, his needs, his requirements, etc. After that you can analyze the data and comment them. You finally write a document with all the requirements and mock-up of the project (like screen shot, etc...). The document must be validated by the customer and you can put it in the ZenTao Doc module. You can start creating stories, tasks, sprints... The before-project stage is a part of the job.

Manage projects using ZenTao

With some simple changes, you can easily transform ZenTao.

You have a parameter like this when choosing the concept:

It can be a parameter like this for:

Note: a V Cycle Project can be waterfall or not.

Maintain a project

Conclusion

With little adaptations, ZenTao can be used to manage all these kind of projects because I think ZenTao now is mature to do it. A few years ago I think it can't unless a lot of evolution. Now I think ZenTao is ready to be extended to all kind of projects.

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