The complexity of simple communication

Posted by admin on Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 12:41 pm in Communication, software. No comments.

During the various projects that have kept me busy the last couple of months I’ve noticed how much simplicity serves experts, not beginners. I’m talking about project management for which I use Basecamp.

Basecamp helps you move forward

A lot has been said already about Basecamp and its wonderful simplicity. The great thing for me as a web professional is that it helps me strip the project down to its basics. Taking a problem, breaking it down into a simple To Do-list linked to a milestone and then completing those To Do-items one by one (and in the end the milestone) makes you feel wonderfully productive.

But for the life of me I cannot get other people to use anything else but the messaging system. I present Basecamp as an alternative to e-mailing each other paragraphs of bloated text four times an hour but in the end that’s just what we do. The bad thing is that if my clients don’t take a simple, down-to-basics approach to project management I can’t either.

The complexity of simplicity

It’s not that surprising: keeping things simple is very, very complex. Only with full understanding of a subject can you simplify it. The key to Basecamp as project management software is that it enables you to communicate quickly in a concise, unambiguous way. But when you don’t really understand what you’re doing you don’t want to be concise and unambiguous out of fear of making a mistake and looking stupid.

The mental load of analyzing a problem and deconstructing it into a finite set of 1-line To Do-items is far greater than spending 45 minutes writing a 1200-word review of a design comp. At least, that’s how it feels in the short term. And as long as nobody points out the alternatives than even in the long term it feels alright. That’s how businesses got into the habit of having four two-hour meetings a day while everybody knows it’s a waste of time.

The challenge

Small budget-projects need an agile approach for success, but this requires a full understanding of the subject matter and of why the agile approach is necessary. But how can we make sure all participants meet these requirement before the damage of inefficient, costly communication has been done?