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Slightly meta about project management and software

Has anyone read the basecamp shape up book (https://basecamp.com/shapeup), would you recommend it? I've read a bunch of Goldratt and find it strange that they aren't into Kanbans, which I love as a general task management tool but basecamp only supports through 3rd party plug ins. But then again I use Roam Research, which has a kanban, but is more towards general note-taking than being geared towards project management. 

I wonder why basecamp doesn't like the idea of kanbans, because coming from the theory of constraints idea, kanbans help with single handing tasks, and it helps with prioritizing what is in the backlog. One other thing I want to be able to have the option of is to play around with Gantt charts with a project of mine, which is also not a basecamp thing. Is there a project management idea that goes against this too?

Comments & Events

Elliot, Fallible Ideas
I haven't read Shape Up (I read Rework and Remote which are OK – quick, pretty good, not very deep, kinda like Basecamp itself). My guess about why Basecamp doesn't include Kanban cards is because they prioritize simplicity.

I think Kanban has developed two separate meanings. The original was a production management system and the newer meaning is just a UI where you can drag cards around. The UI is OK but nothing special, IMO. For management, Goldratt focused on other stuff he thought was more important like buffers. I don't think he mentions Kanban in his novels. Here he is in The Race saying Kanban cards themselves are not very important:

The key to Ford’s and Ohno’s systems lies not in the conveyor belts or Kanban cards but in the fact that the belts and the cards are mechanisms for establishing a predetermined inventory buffer (rope length) between each two work centers.

Theory of Constraints Handbook by James Cox III, John Schleier doesn't say very much about Kanban (considering that it's 1200 pages). Here's most of what it says: