The impact of proliferating “share” options on our use of project management tools
Last week, after several years of gratifying experience with Basecamp, our organization dialed down our account to the free plan, just to keep the account minimally active. Other than that, we have stopped using Basecamp.
How did that happen? Was it something Basecamp did? No, not at all.
Basecamp is a fantastic product. It was only three years ago that I gave a TIG presentation about Basecamp in which I sang the praises of Basecamp and how it was an indispensable tool in planning, editing and building out the California Food Stamp Guide web project, one which involved collaboration among eleven editors sprawled across four different legal services organizations. At that juncture, Basecamp was the web-based benchmark for project management: A secure, well designed, user friendly set of core project management tools (tasks, milestones, messaging and file storage) in a web-based workspace enabling multiple users from multiple locations to get things done on a shared project. It was an especially remarkable application 3-5 years ago because it effectively — and uniquely — integrated in one web location what we increasingly saw the need to do: Share stuff via the Web. Or as the metaphor for web productivity is now called, “the Cloud.”
What has changed in the last several years is that the notion of “sharing” things via the Web, once a novel or niche concept, is now the new norm. And the options for sharing work activity and work product have exploded exponentially in the last few years. During a recent telephone conversation with an executive director of another non-profit advocacy organization here in California who had called to talk about our organization’s experience with Google Apps, I started talking a fair amount about how the work paradigm has shifted so dramatically the last few years because of the proliferation of web-based applications like Gmail and Google Docs and Google Calendar. Part of that paradigm shift is the increasingly widespread expectation that someone you work with can “share” things with you, which is to say you are able to let the other person, via a web browser or mobile app, view, edit or comment on a shared document, presentation, image, whatever. I commented during the conversation something to the effect that there was a point in time when I thought it was odd that someone told me I could not send them a fax because their office had no fax machine; and at a later point in time when someone explained they had to fax something to me because they did not have email at their office; and then I observed that “I think we have reached a new tipping point, where others will reasonably expect you can offer or accept sharing of documents and files using applications like Google Docs.”
There’s the rub for an application like Basecamp. Five years ago what Basecamp offered was unique. It no longer is. The practical reality is that most everything we used to do with Basecamp we can now do with, or better, or in a more facile fashion with our hosted Google Apps. Shareable files with Google Docs. Check. Shareable real-time “writeboards” and editing with Google Docs. Check. Native document editing and sharing of MS Office files via Google Docs with Google Cloud Connect. Check. Integrated messaging with Gmail, Google Chat, and Google Docs. Check. Real-time document commenting with Google Docs Discussions. Check. Shareable private or public project content sites with Google Sites. Check. And for larger private or public work projects that require more complicated task and milestone management, well, there is Manymoon with Google Docs and Google Calendar integration. Check, and then some.
That is what the share explosion has done to our use of Basecamp, which remains an exceptional product but is no longer integral to what we do.
