Why I’m working on Knomni.com, more project management software?

There are hundreds if not thousands of project management solutions out there, from Trello to Jira, the simplest to the most confusing, the best UI to the worst. Ironically now the same owners.

So why create another one?

Basically, because it didn’t suit my planning style and I think others will feel the same. Trello is cool, simple to use and often times gets the job done, but for larger projects, it’s just doesn’t cut it. You need to get into more details for some tasks for your team, but you need higher level organisation for the rest of the company. By the time you’re done, you’ve probably got dozens of Trello boards if not hundreds. Keeping track of them gets to be more hassle than it’s worth.

And then there’s information that doesn’t quite fit into Trello. As a project manager, business owner, or product manager, there is a lot of information to keep track of. So you probably use something like a notepad, OneNote, evernote or if you’re really organised, an outliner like Workflowy. Personally I prefer checkVist because it works better with a keyboard. Outliners are a great way to store persistent data that you might or might not ever need. You can organise it, collapse it, move things around.

Great, so now you have dozens of Trello boards, an outline for persistent data, but you need a way to track the big picture of when things will get done, so you pull out some gantt chart tracking tools. Ok, Teamgantt is pretty good, Roadmunk has some advantages, so you re-type all your projects into one of those and manually keep them in sync. Not a lot of fun, but you need it to make sure you’re staying on track and updating progress to your team and the rest of the company.

Phew, getting tired yet? Well, you still need to document things. Sometimes a simple outline won’t cut it, you need full documents using something like Markdown to explain what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, etc. So now what? You could store notes in Trello, but then how will you find them again once the tickets are closed? Confluence? Yikes. Expensive and a mess to use. You can search but organising and moving things around is difficult.

What if one app could do all that?

So let’s combine an outliner that’s easy to use with a mouse or a keyboard, mobile or web. Move things around at will, collapse, delete, indent. What if you could now create a gantt chart that allows nesting of sub-tasks at any point in your outline and easily set time and progress estimates? What if at any point in the outline, you could see a kanban board of those items? Sub-items on the outliner are sub-tasks. Need more sub-tasks, dive into a sub-board. Need higher detail for the rest of the company, go the kanban board one level up. What if each item on the outline could be a full document? Now you can add Markdown documents to each item, move them around, collapse them and easily find them again later.

So Knomni is…

• an Outliner
• a Roadmapping tool, i.e. Gantt chart
• a Kanban board
• and a Document management tool

What else can it do?

We have a lot more ideas coming soon. For example, a full chat system attached to each topic so you can follow only topics that you care about. Think of it as Slack with nested rooms. What about file uploads? What if each item could have files attached. Now not only could you upload files, but you could actually find them again later when you are looking for them.

Can I see a poorly made video with no sound?

Sure!

Pricing

Knomni will be free for single users, but organisations will need to pay $5/month per user/ per month.

Is it ready?

If you like “alpha” level software, don’t mind the occasional bug, and are really cutting edge, then sure! I use it every day.