Kanban V.S. Basecamp

When it comes to Kanban Boards and Motivation it seems to me that they are very poor. They basically always look the same, there's very little visible progress, there's always a lot of stress looking at the backlog which is usually years worth of work. There's no end, no beginning, only work.

Here's an illustration of what I see:

I honestly thing that none of the motivation actually comes from the kanban board itself. I think most Agile relies heavily on the Stand-up providing the validation and the Stress of Accountability.

But without that, people devolve into dumb ticket takers, and get Burn Out from Neverending Sprints. By not doing Stand-up, we are [[Predictably Irrational - basic human motivations: Dan Ariely at TEDxMidwest|de-motivating by ignoring]].

However, Stand-ups are a very heavy process. They are a form of Synchronous Communication, interupt the programmer, and provide no papertrail or documentation and generally are anti-Remote work.

Doing some Meeting Math, you can see how heavy they are in terms of time at least:

Number of People * Minutes = Actual Length of the Meeting

5 * 30min = 2 1/2 hours (per day)
5 * 30min * 5 days = 12 hours or 1 1/2 days lost!

That said, we can motivate without stand-ups!

Motivation Without Stand-ups

To be truly motivating, I feel like a project-management tool HAS to be:

1. Project Oriented: Show visible progress on a bigger project getting DONE!
2. Social: People get to get validation for what they've done.

Basecamp provides these two things

A visible Project

In Basecamp projects are first class! They are something you can SEE and something that will eventually be DONE.

Then I can compartmentalize and go into a single project and think about that without the stress of everything else that I need to do!

Looking at a "scope" of the project (a smaller piece that can be completed independently) it doesn't look so bad!

A Social Place

Basecamp doesn't separate project management and communicaiton, but rather binds them together. This has the effect of making it much more social (and therefore motivating) and it also means that projects and todos get updated much more frequently!