Pivotal Tracker was the first time I saw a digital kanban board where the workflow was represented as a series of columns you dragged items through. Since then, its become popular paradigm for pretty much every popular project management software UI around.
I always wondered, did Pivotal Tracker invent this paradigm? They were surely using it before any of the big players utilized it.
My first tech job was for a small IT consulting company that specialized in open source solutions in the early 2000's. The owner was basically the sales and overall strategy guy, I did consulting and implementations with clients, and most everyone else specialized in either their own low-level tech or business stuff.
At our height, the owner started bringing in more projects than our current workflow could handle. Customers started getting angry because their projects would slip through the cracks and get delayed if they weren't calling us up weekly to nag us for status. I sort of became the project manager by default because I touched most of the projects in some way and I was the go-to guy when someone had a question about the status of a project. I wasn't really happy about this because I liked doing tech stuff more than I liked managing projects.
In an attempt to preserve my sanity and get back to logging billable hours, I grabbed a deck of blank index cards and wrote down the company name, project name, status and for each project we had. (I didn't like spreadsheets at the time and this was faster than writing code.) That way, I didn't have to actively remember the status of every project. When needed or when asked, I could just grab the card and look. Once a week or so, I would update the status of each project on the card.
Not long after, I got to noticing that there was really only four (or five, I don't recall) states that any project could be in and decided to stop writing them on the cards. Instead I placed the cards in dedicated piles that represented the project's status and moved them around as needed. That worked well. Eventually, I thought it would good if everyone on the team could see the projects and their status as well, so I grabbed an old whiteboard, hung it on the wall behind me, drew a column for each status, and taped all the cards into the column corresponding to their status. This was a BIG improvement. I stopped wasting an hour every morning just going over project status with the boss and other employees. Everyone could just walk over to the area near my desk and look at the wall behind me. (It was an open-plan office before those were "cool.") Others could move the cards between columns themselves. When a client called demanding an update, I could just glance behind me.
A few jobs later, I took a compulsory three-day seminar on Agile and saw that they called this thing a Kanban board.
No, Pivotal Tracker did not invent this paradigm. For background, I started working around 2005.
Before tools like Tracker or JIRA, people who were doing agile development did everything with physical index cards. There was a lot of controversy even about digitizing those workflows back in the day - "we lose human connection and conversation by putting it in the machine!" Nobody has those conversations anymore as far as I'm aware.
Like others have mentioned on this thread, the true innovation of Tracker was to have a single view where stories are ordered vertically in a single column and grouped by status. This really changes the conversation around what is top priority. Everything can be urgent and have a high level of priority, but if you put something at the top, something else must shift down in compensation. No more doing that thing where there are five number one priorities at the same time.
The Agile view in Jira actually owes some inspiration to Tracker, if you can believe it. I know because I was there. I was a client on a Pivotal Labs project way back in the day, back when Tracker was still not publicly available, but only available to clients of Pivotal Labs. Our PM loved Tracker and wanted to use it but knew we could not get approval for it back home, all other teams were on JIRA. So our PM found a JIRA plugin called Greenhopper, tracked down the developer, and fed this person feedback to try and turn Greenhopper into the most Tracker-like thing possible. Greenhopper eventually got absorbed into Atlassian and turned into what is today known as Jira Agile.
Tracker felt like such an amazing breath of fresh air and forward looking technology at the time when it came out. Tracker used Ruby on Rails and did sexy AJAX stuff on the frontend (big wow factor back then, this was the age of IE6).
I loved Tracker for many years. I could sing its praises all day long. That said, the people who worked on the product had some philosophical things that got in the way of the product evolving. Reasonably, they did not want to turn into a huge enterprise tracking tool. Problem was, there were never any more features built into Tracker that really gave a good view for people who were higher level than the daily boots on the ground folks. So no good visualizations or features for projects where multiple teams must execute in tandem, and there are complex interdependencies between the teams. So while Tracker was awesome for the folks on the dev team, it wasn't very helpful for people in middle or upper management who needed birds-eye visibility easily and at a glance.
So although I am sad to see this announcement in a way I'm quite hopeful. There are so many people who love this tool and will miss it, now there's no excuse for them not to go build something better!
I always wondered, did Pivotal Tracker invent this paradigm? They were surely using it before any of the big players utilized it.