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I made some (subjective) notes describing the pieces of functionality we might want out of our product/project management workflow here - here's my synopsis of how GitHub fairs vs. alternatives:
Work Discovery
facilitates capture of feedback from stakeholders, creation of backlog items, and discovery of the work required to complete them
LA take:
GH is a great tool for capturing bugs and feature requests directly from developers because of its tight integration directly with code within GH and because it has so many integrations with other tools. Where it might fall short is gathering feedback from non-technical users like division managers, which is important because many of them are visionaries. productboard is the best tool I've seen for feedback collection because it facilitates that collection by being able to forward emails directly into the feedback backlog, has a Chrome add-in that enables linking directly to any web pages where feedback could be gathered from, integrations with other communications tools like Slack and Teams, and the productboard Portal, which was designed to be a stakeholder facing way to define potential work and gather feedback directly from stakeholders in a nice UI. I do like GH's feature of having a "Draft" which could denote a new idea that is being discovered, which would help facilitate the discovery workflow.
Backlog Prioritization
facilitates prioritization and sequencing of work items based on strategic goals
LA take:
GH's "Priority" field for backlog items is nice, but I've run into issues before trying to prioritize just off of one field; in reality that priority would be a highly subjective take of the value a work item might provide, which is actually based on other driving factors, which are important to define, e.g. a work item's value to reducing management overhead vs. its value to increasing adoption/expansion of the user base. I also like productboard for this functionality, and we transitioned to it from just trying to use Jira in this role due to the inevitable flat backlog in Jira and its lack of feature for measuring value of work items against on-another. I know there are other tools out there like ProductPlan that we may want to or should consider as well.
A note on GH custom views- we may be able to engineer a process around using the custom views effectively for prioritization purposes by leveraging work item attributes like tags and size; I think there are other tools that probably fit the bill better, but this could work
Execution & Delivery
facilitates tracking and communication of current and near-term work in discrete timeframes (iterations/sprints)
LA take:
GH works well as a Kanban tool, but I haven't seen much on its use for scoping down a backlog of work to iterations with discrete time frames. I'll need to do some more research on this, but I've used both Jira, Azure DevOps, Trello, and Asana, which have suited the job well, and the features I've liked most in those are workflow automation, organizational features, and intuitiveness of how to define work (which is one of the hardest things IMO). One speed bump here may be the lack of a work item hierarchy - it's nice to be able to group things together easily with parents/children that can be compared against one-another at varying levels; their Size attribute for work items might help on this front, but it still doesn't help show the tree of larger items with smaller ones, which I find very useful (e.g., the Epic>Feature>User Story>Task Agile work item hierarchy). Note: one of the most important things about this tool its its integration with planning tools to enable efficient mgmt of the work lifecycle. The fact that GH itself touts GH projects' integratability with other delivery tools like Trello
Some of the new features I like in GH project related to this functional scope:
insights charts - helps understand resource capacity and high-level picture of the backlog with good slicing/dicing functionality
workflows are great - automating having to manually change statuses or do things that should always happen as work items move through their lifecycle is huge; this is especially nice since we can tie it directly to our repos/pull requests
Version control:
facilitates stable software release by tracking changes, enabling versioning, continuous integration, and continuous delivery (deployment) tools
LA take: GH is the de facto standard version control software with great code review features, integrations and internal features for CI/CD automation, and visualizing and exploring code and contributions (commits, syntax highlighting, etc.). The fact that dbt packages can also only be made publicly available on their hub through GH makes it a no-brainer. Lastly, the addition of GHCR just makes this an even stronger candidate for this functional scope.
Documentation/Knowledge Base
facilitates discovery and tracking of processes & procedures we follow (such as this one) and general documentation of shared knowledge for our and the wider Apex team
LA take:
GH's wiki feature and GH pages are nice features for documentation, but a few areas GH falls short:
integrations with visualization/graphing tools like Lucid and Vizio - I also haven't seen much by way of add-ons/software that can be used to augment GH's knowledge base
not sure on this one, but GH seems strong for docs about code and strategic-level descriptive overviews, but I don't know (haven't seen) whether it supports documentation that we might not want to share with the world like meeting notes or internal process docs that might be sensitive
navigation/UI delight - GH is mostly tailored to developers, and we need a good way to allow self-service consumption of our knowledge/docs in this project for all users, not just the technically savvy
Plans Communication
facilitates communication of planned work for stakeholders to understand the team's strategic position and timeline of when work will be executed
LA take: the insights charts are nice for some rudimentary comms within this functional scope, but I have yet to find any features related to specific timelines, which are important
Real-Time Communication & Collaboration
facilitates communication between individuals/teams in real time (via chat, audio, video, etc.)
LA take:
GH doesn't fit the bill, nor would we expect it to - tools like Slack and Teams do the job here, and I don't think we're feeling much pain. We could potentially leverage something like Calendly to facilitate coordination/scheduling of meetings to enable RT comms as the user base expands
I made some (subjective) notes describing the pieces of functionality we might want out of our product/project management workflow here - here's my synopsis of how GitHub fairs vs. alternatives:
Work Discovery
facilitates capture of feedback from stakeholders, creation of backlog items, and discovery of the work required to complete them LA take:
Backlog Prioritization
facilitates prioritization and sequencing of work items based on strategic goals LA take:
Execution & Delivery
facilitates tracking and communication of current and near-term work in discrete timeframes (iterations/sprints) LA take:
Version control:
facilitates stable software release by tracking changes, enabling versioning, continuous integration, and continuous delivery (deployment) tools LA take: GH is the de facto standard version control software with great code review features, integrations and internal features for CI/CD automation, and visualizing and exploring code and contributions (commits, syntax highlighting, etc.). The fact that dbt packages can also only be made publicly available on their hub through GH makes it a no-brainer. Lastly, the addition of GHCR just makes this an even stronger candidate for this functional scope.
Documentation/Knowledge Base
facilitates discovery and tracking of processes & procedures we follow (such as this one) and general documentation of shared knowledge for our and the wider Apex team LA take:
Plans Communication
facilitates communication of planned work for stakeholders to understand the team's strategic position and timeline of when work will be executed LA take: the insights charts are nice for some rudimentary comms within this functional scope, but I have yet to find any features related to specific timelines, which are important
Real-Time Communication & Collaboration
facilitates communication between individuals/teams in real time (via chat, audio, video, etc.) LA take: