xProcess

I have multiple projects for which I am responsible. I try to keep just one on the 'front burner', although this doesn't always work. Leaving out the nastiness inherent to juggling projects, I believe my two main needs are:

1) Input backlog items into a project which is not currently "on the front burner", e.g. as ideas or non-critical issues come up. This would obviously work using separate projects.

2) Track the assignments given out to shared resources to keep them from overlapping, and to see when overlap does occur so that I, or my boss if needed, can make a decision on what to do. Also, because we operate with more shared than non-shared personnel, additional tasks or time overruns can affect scheduling of other projects, and we need to see this to take corrective action asap. This is where having separate projects seems to break down, as often I need to to something like "Project A > Sprint N" follows after "Project B > Spring M", if that makes any sense.

I am probably going to do some experiments with both approaches over the next few days, but any input would be most welcome.

P.S. I am currently using Mingle (the free 5 user version), and I set it up in a similar mode with multiple projects in as one "Project" artifact, only to find it more and more difficult to manage as more Sprints where input. I think the more powerful OGNL approach in xProcess probably makes some of the things I ran into w/ Mingle non-problems (they have variables, but in a much more limited sense, although the ruby based macros they added probably could be used to do what I wanted). Any potential show stoppers, or "gotchas" that anyone here can think of that I should be aware of?

Thanks.