Where is the simple project management app?
Over the years I’ve gained a lot of experience using Basecamp, GoPlan and currently Rule.fm to participate in and manage large and small projects. To this day none of them seem to hit the spot. They all fail in one aspect or another and the failure is often large enough to impede productivity in the long-run.
It appears current PM apps including the ones I mentioned above ask the right questions but eventually grow into the wrong answers. I look at products like twitter and facebook and one thing is constant. They evolve around a single action which in their case is sharing content in the form of text, links, videos and photos. I am never lost.
Sadly getting lost in tools like Basecamp and Rule.fm is very easy. There is no clear discernible ground zero. If I have to ask, “how should this bit of information be communicated?” or “should I upload a file to the app or just email an attachment?”, “Should I comment on the file itself or post a message about it inside the project containing the file?”. It is my belief that a user should never have to ask those questions.
Then you have PM apps that scale back too far. They’re nothing more than a glorified todo application. They champion collaboration over the act of getting things done.
So what is ideal?
Ideally speaking
A user should be able to sit down and know exactly how to communicate effectively without friction. I say reduce friction between the following features.
- Messages/Discussions
- Commenting on individual assets (e.g, todos, files, messages, etc)
- File management
All of the web apps I’ve mentioned claim to be better than email. Yet, many teams and organizations still fall back on it because it does two things well. It shares messages and files very easily. It’s one-to-one collaboration at its best. But where email tends to fall flat is during many-to-many or one-to-many collaboration.
That’s why we have tools like Basecampe, Rule.fm and GoPlan. But they all lose the effective simplicity of email.
I want the friction-lacking simplicity of email and the collaborative effectiveness of web-based tools.
Some day
I tried once to solve this problem with a personal project called “Kindmanage”. It didn’t get too far. But my recent experiences in PM apps have reignited those flames.
