Czech Television - From Redmine to Easy Redmine Project Management (interview)
“Česká televize” is a Czech’s national TV channel with more than 60 years of history, making it the oldest streaming TV channel in the country. Department of New Media has quickly grown in the last years and original software solutions for project management began to seem insufficient.
We interviewed Mr. Michal Trnka - one of two top project managers, who lead New Media's department with approximately 100 employees.
What circumstances pushed you to look for a project management software in general?
The number of projects increases every year and original solution started to be insufficient. Especially project planning features, outputs and statistics. And we wanted to improve project management in general.
What were the originally used project management tools?
We used Redmine open source for couple of years and we liked it. However, since we grew rapidly in the last years, then outputs started to be unsatisfactory.
Anyway, we found Redmine logic as the right one, so we wanted to keep the structure of projects as it was… We are using SAP system as well.
How did you choose proper tool?
Since we wanted to stay with Redmine, we started to look for available Redmine integrators on the market. We tried a couple of them and finally chose Easy Redmine, because it provided a complete solution that fitted all our requirements.
What convinced you to purchase Easy Redmine?
I can tell for sure that it was because of statistics and reports. Thanks to the detailed outcomes I can now better evaluate our projects on both, project level and on projects portfolio overview level.
Could you please describe benefits and improvements that you saw after integration of Easy Redmine?
If we take a bit further step back, I can say that we saw significant improvement of our workflow with integration of basic Redmine couple of years ago. As Easy Redmine is improved Redmine, the change for regular workers was not so big and that was actually a huge advantage for us, because transfer went smoothly.
I personally see the biggest benefits on the management level - thanks to the reporting tool I see who worked on what type of activity, who analyzed or tested and how much time it took. As an outcome, I can see what projects are running efficiently and are worth to continuing.
In addition, I like planning of resources and human capacities.
Generally I can summarize that projects are now more transparent than before.
Have you in any way integrated Easy Redmine with your original system?
Yes, we have integrated Easy Redmine with GIT and that also saves us a lot of time.
Is there anything you are not satisfied with? What should we improve in the future?
Just the little things - but as I work in IT world for a long time, I know that it happens during implementation of every software.
Do you already have any plans for the future?
Yes, we will purchase more licenses very soon - now we are using 97 out of 100 available. In addition, we are considering buying a new plugin in the near future - namely Agile Project Management Plugin .
Would you recommend Easy Redmine to other companies?
Yes, I would, because I found software very logical and intuitive.