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  • My Basecamp Failure

    By Joshua Kim January 6, 2011 11:45 pm EST

    I am a Basecamp failure. I have failed at Basecamp. I have failed 37 Signals.

    Today I cancelled my Basecamp account. I admitted defeat, and in this space I own up to my inadequacies.

    Basecamp is terrific. Elegant, simple and affordable software. The fault must lie with me.

    Here was my plan. In my new gig, I was going to get the team off e-mail as a project management tool once and for all. Basecamp was to be used not only to manage our technology and course development projects, but to create a transparent environment for To Do lists and project schedules. From May of 2010 until yesterday I assiduously updated my Basecamp project sites. I shared my project To Do lists. I put in milestones. I copied project messages into the system.

    The problem was, none of my team (and we are a very very small team) was all that interested. They humored me. Said nice things. But in the end, they did not care about seeing my To Do lists. Documents were in Google Docs, or on shared directories, not in Basecamp. Project dates and milestones were born in Excel and wanted to stay in Excel. Dates are on Exchange calendars. And e-mail is still the tool that everyone uses to manage and keep track of collaborations.

    My biggest realization during this failed Basecamp experiment is that nobody really wants to see my To Do list. I thought we'd all share our lists, add things to each others lists, and basically create a system where we could easily tell what we are all up to. The reality turned out to be that everyone is too busy to look at each others work lives, and it is much more efficient to walk down the hall and have a chat.

    So for now, I'm back to putting my To Do items in iCal, and everything else in e-mail, Excel and folders.

    Chalk up my Basecamp failure to a classic P.I.C.N.I.C. story: Problem in Caller (me) Not In Computer (software).

    When have you failed good software?

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Comments on My Basecamp Failure

  • Posted by Gemma on January 7, 2011 at 7:00am EST
  • Thanks for validating my own (exact) experience with Basecamp - and with my staff! I expect to cancel next month.

    My current failure is with OmniFocus. I love all the options and granularity - and I hate all the options and granularity. It requires I approach my work flow as if it were a science project. Unless I've missed it, I can't seem to display ALL tasks by descending date. Or put another way, I can't eliminate my need to see out a few weeks to decide what are my priorities.
  • Whose failure?
  • Posted by Mark Notess , Why can't IHE remember my title and department? at and my institution? on January 7, 2011 at 10:15am EST
  • (Slightly tongue in cheek) I failed at Windows. No matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't put up with an operating system whose performance degraded so badly over time that I needed to reinstall it every year or two. So I had to switch to a Mac. :)

    Seriously, did you fail Basecamp? Or did Basecamp fail you? Or was it perhaps simply a mismatch, where the kind of collaborative work it is designed to support wasn't the same as what you were doing?

    I think we're all too quick to blame ourselves. But work processes are fairly resistant to change, often for good reasons. Buying (or designing) software should be accompanied by an assessment of work practice that looks at social & tacit elements as well as the obvious activities, to see what will make a good fit. Sometimes work processes do have to change, but such change requires thoughtful change management and is seldom accomplished just by inserting a new technology into an environment.
  • Posted by andrea on January 10, 2011 at 9:45am EST
  • Interesting how email has such a hold on us. At least google docs has made some headway there.
  • Similar experience with SharePoint
  • Posted by Anotherstory at Maguire Associates, Inc. on January 10, 2011 at 10:45am EST
  • We use Basecamp, but pretty much just as a safe way to exchange sensitive files with clients. That works fine for us. We also have SharePoint, and the idea was that we would collaborate on documents that way. Some use it for a certain type of project, but most of us don't; we still turn on "track changes" in Word and email the files to each other. Work habits change slowly, as another commenter noted, and anything that seems like an extra bother without readily identifiable (and personally experienced) benefits is going to be sloughed off.
  • basecamp success
  • Posted by Donna Milgram , Executive Director at IWITTS on January 11, 2011 at 4:15pm EST
  • We love basecamp and we've been using it for our Projects for 5 or 6 years. We couldn't live without it. Yes, we got some resistance however we also get those who tell us how great it is, no more hunting around. We use it internally and externally on Projects. It's a requirement in our interview questions and in laying the groundwork for our Projects - it does allow true collaboration and it's efficient. No more hunting through emails for the most recent thread or document. I only wish basecamp incorporated some cloud methodology.
  • Basecamp Empathy
  • Posted by Phillip Krick , Project Manager at Neo-Pangea Digital Design Boutique on February 25, 2011 at 5:00pm EST
  • Awesome Post! I've been trying to compile information like this for my company and wrote my own blog about why we're sticking with Basecamp. Check it out if you're inclined: http://lab.neo-pangea.com/blog/2011/02/basecamp-sucks-less-than-everything-else/

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