I recently got my first job in IT — at the age of 40! — at a public university in Italy, thanks in large part to all the reading and learning I’ve done over the years through Fedora and the open source community.
I’m currently working in a very small department. Our IT team consists of just two people (including me). Since starting this new career, I’ve been surprised by how little attention is paid to project management and technical documentation. Because of that, I’ve started looking for tools that could help us work in a more organized way.
Here are some of the features I’m looking for:
Tracking task progress (in my previous job, I used to write meeting minutes every week).
Maintaining a logbook or knowledge base (I was thinking of a wiki) to document how we implement solutions and why certain decisions were made.
Hosting some code (custom scripts and similar tools).
Being simple to maintain.
We don’t need advanced features. I don’t want to spend more time managing the tool than actually doing the work.
For some reason, Forgejo immediately caught my attention. It was designed to track changes to files, has a built-in wiki, and can obviously host code, all in one place.
However, that’s just my first impression. I’d really appreciate hearing your suggestions: how do you handle these kinds of tasks in your organizations? Are there any widely adopted best practices or standards for small IT teams?
Of course, the solution should be free and open source.
Thanks for your answer.
We are not focused on software development, but mainly on system administration and some help desk stuff for some ticket we sometimes receive ( i.e. “hey all of my files disappear…”).
Anyway I’ll give a look to Agile method.
FWIW, I use Wiki.js to store many of my sysadmin notes. To make it a little easier to backup and (potentially) move around, I use the SQLite database option, but that is slower than the recommended PostgreSQL.
The bare minimum would probably be a Git repo + Task tracker.
Work items → Task Tracker
Wiki/Docs → Markdown files in a Git repo, with lazy review requirements
User/Customer requests → Task tracker
Infra configuration → Git repo
Scripts → Git repo
Infra Inventory → Git repo
( You could have a todo list as a file in a Git repo instead of a task tracker, but that’s a bit too hardcore, and doesn’t allow external non-IT users to file requests for you)
Of course if you look at modern Git Forges, you don’t need to go with that bare minimum. They come already with more specialization, and include Git Repos, Wiki, Issues, Pages, Kanban board and CI Actions.
I think in most orgs nowadays you will find a Git Forge, a Task tracker and a CI Engine in various combinations: could be one of Gitlab/BitBucket/GitHub,.. + one of Trello/Jira/ Bugzilla/Redmine/Phabricator + one of Actions, Jenkins, Buildbot, Bamboo…
If you have a possibility to choose your own tools, rather than to start using something already available in your company or use a service, Forgejo is definitely a safe and reasonable choice.
Another department in my University is currently using Wiki.js to take note on their systems. But they have a larger team and could mantain different tools. BTW it is a very good choice.