With the coming of age of agile software development, project managers have been left behind in the rush to develop tools to support the processes. As a result, they have had to use unsuitable tools such as Microsoft Project or more likely have been forced into building planning and tracking processes using Microsoft Excel. Excel is a wonderfully flexible piece of software, but there are some clear and present dangers with managing your project in this way:

• It is error prone. Ever tried to debug a complex spreadsheet?
• It is not transferable. Ever tried to take over someone else's complex and un-commented spreadsheet?
• It does not encourage consistency of approach or terminology. Project managers, irrespective of their experience, invariably have to build the concepts and processes from scratch.
• It is difficult to share information with team members.
• There is lots of information that doesn't fit easily into Excel, so you end up with multiple data stores with all the problems that brings.

Whilst there has been an improvement in tools on the market which purport to manage projects in an agile way, they are currently immature, have restrictions and are largely not scalable above the very small project.

Project managers are crying out for a tool which allows them to plan and track in an agile way which speaks in terms of Lean concepts and allows them to collect information from their agile teams but still has the flexibility to be customized to the unique attributes of any particular engagement. ThoughtWorks, with its world leading approach to agile development and project management, is perfectly placed to solve this problem, and Mingle is the solution.