Self-Hosted Project Management for Tiny Teams

Ceremony budget

Tiny teams die under enterprise workflows. If you will not groom a backlog weekly, do not install a suite that assumes you will. Start with issues + milestones.

Default fields: title, owner, due date. Cut templates ruthlessly — empty fields train people back into chat.

Single source of truth

One tracker. Parallel boards + git issues + chat tasks guarantees lost work. Chat notifications should link to the canonical issue URL, not duplicate the task body.

Attachments and retention

Tickets accumulate customer-ish data. Set retention, expire guest access, know how to purge one project's attachments.

Backups include file stores

Issue text without attachment volumes is a partial restore. Map mounts; drill by reopening one issue **with** its screenshot.

docker inspect pm-app-1 --format '{{json .Mounts}}'

[Add real environment data here]
PM tool + version:
DB volume:
Uploads volume:
Last restore drill (date):

Templates that fit on-call

Incident: impact, start, status, next update, owner. Release: version, rollback note, backup confirmed. Keep them short.

Day-30 review

Are open tasks in the tracker? Are notifications muted from spam? Can a new member find the roadmap alone? Any "no" → simplify before adding integrations.

Failure modes

Zombie Kanban, webhook noise, attachment disk fill, forgotten guest accounts.

Related reading

See Wiki for small teams, Docker Compose hardening, and Restore drill playbook.