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Getting Real: Success Breeds Arrogance
Absolutism is remarkable and linkworthy until you piss people off. The condescending nature of 37Signals Blog is causing people to lose faith in their product quality.
What was once remarkable still is, but for different reasons. Do any TWers still use 37Signals stuff?
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Comments
Indeed Arrogant
I use basecamp and they are indeed an arrogant bunch. Scrolling through the forum you see numerous repeated requests for features which they continually dismiss because simply because it isn't "the way they do things". I'd love to switch to something else that better suited my needs, just haven't found one yet.
Ditto, we use basecamp and
Ditto, we use basecamp and like it but when it comes to the forum they have that arrogant tone. It has been said many times and one would think that Jason Fried would take notice. He, BTW seems to be the worst offender.
If you don't mind hosting
If you don't mind hosting the application yourself, then I'd suggest taking a look at activeCollab. We use that and Mantis and they work very well.
Looking at things from a development standpoint
I've seen the same thing happen over and over again through the years, and I've been an instigator of such behavior myself.
This is one of the main reasons that if you achieve any level of success whatsoever you need a buffer zone between your developers and your public.
As a developer, especially as a freelance building something new, you can start off focusing on any bell and whistle that you want. As projects grow, you start realizing where your mistakes have global effects, but you get pushed into enhancement mode. Eventually, the prioritization issue comes up because the workload is too high and too often from this conversation comes a not-too-well-thought-out definition of project goals that gets religiously adhered to by developers, managers, and anybody else peripherally involved - no matter how stupid the definition is.
Case in point - look at how Mozilla absolutely refuses to use the Webdings font regardless of your declared font settings. There are too many people that THINK they are right, who have veto power over a popularly requested feature. They aren't losing customers over it, but if the user base at large spent any time producing feature requests, they would switch back to IE in a heartbeat.
There are few product managers who can recognize problems with foundational assumptions and push through a changing of mentality. The number of companies that can do it gracefully is few and far between.
I'm mainly speaking from an enterprise development standpoint (my primary function for the last decade), but the same principals appear online and are even more crucial to identify because a jaded customer base doesn't just hurt productivity, it hurts the bottom line.
I'm actually surprised that Google doesn't run into this issue more, but largely their software projects have relatively small followings. They do a good job of evangelizing their projects to the point where the people who are really loud about dissatisfaction get drowned out by the positive guys. I still think they should do a better job of shielding their developers. It's only a matter of time before one of them makes a stupid remark that hits the front page somewhere.
Is there no good solution?
My company has played with Basecamp, dotproject and a few others but they all kind of suck. In a workplace like ours it's not as simple as saying "you do this" and everyone says "yes sir!" We frequently need to get feedback from the team but tools like this are inimical to this process. Furthermore this kind of dialogue generates some incredibly sensitive intel. I've thought about setting up a password-protected Wordpress blog or something... but the whole point behind project manangement software is that people actually have to take time out of their day to use the stupid thing. It's unbelievably difficult to get certain people to do this.
Are there any success stories with SEOs using project management software? I'd like to hear some.
Project Management Software
The best project management software ever is phpbb in my opinion.
We modded it to add file attachments, added minor security changes so that only people authorized to view the rooms can see it, banned it in the robots.txt file and a few other minor thing... it works like a charm...
Project management in my opinion again is nothing more than a dialog to complete the project... so by using a forum format we have a pretty good system in place.
Are there any success
Mantis has really been the most useful tool for us. It doesn't look so pretty but it does help organise the office. You submit each task and people can comment on it (notes) below - similar to a forum post.
Mantis has a good hierarchy system in place which hides sensitive info from anyone with a lesser access (both email alerts and notes). So far with a few config tweaks here and there - it's pretty near perfect.
Heh - yes can't help you there. It's taken a little while for everyone to learn the system here but it's an investment - everyone works much better with this in place than relying on verbal communication.
phpcollab
I use phpcollab which hasnt been updated in a while but is still a great free program.
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=46510
ActiveCollab is good for
ActiveCollab is good for task lists and milestones, but does't have writeboards and doesn't have a time ledger.
PHPCollab is too old, technology wise.
Mantis is good for technical work and can be stretched to handle documentation tasks like building a knowledge base, but it's really a bugtracker. Once you start customizing the default views etc for non-technical people, you start getting those icky "this won't persist long enough to be worthwhile" feelings.
from the comments on the linked article about 37 Signals blog:
I, too, believe that to be true.