On Tuesday October 23rd, I attended the Jazz session in CASCON 07. John Wiegand demonstrated Team Concert which is built on Jazz platform and he took the audience through some project scenarios, mostly from developers’ point of view. I was impressed by Team Concert and liked the user interface, however, as a project manager I was disappointed about the lack of project management support planned for the initial release of Team Concert.

In the beginning of the session, John had mentioned the pain areas that Jazz was addressing, one of which was project management. So I was looking forward to seeing the extend of this support. The functionalities that were demonstrated mostly focused on IDE as well as team collaboration and communication. Project management support was clearly missing, even simple interface to MS Project or MS Excel. I asked John after the session regarding their plan for interfacing to MS Project or MS Excel, he confirmed that it is not part of the initial release of the tool but it is part of their long term plan. He hinted that it is not high in their list of priorities.

From my point of view, for a tool to be used for a small or medium size project, there has to be some project management support. One way to achieve this is by interfacing to MS Project or MS Excel. This would be much simpler than building the support internally and majority of the companies use MS Project and MS Excel. The same way IDE is critical for developer community, interfacing to project management tools is essential for project managements.

We have been using VSTS for enactment of our internal projects and its interface to MS Project is important, although there should be more improvements in this area. I feel that in order for Team Concert to be used in small/medium size team, there needs to be some project management support in place.

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