Your Project Management Software Can't Save You

Which brings us to Gantt charts. In Chapter 0, I gave an overview of the Gantt chart. Created by Henry Gantt, who worked with Frederick Taylor in the early 1900s, it was originally called a Man Record Chart. A line represented whether a worker had shoveled enough coal or moved enough crude iron for the day, as determined by the “foreman.” The “shor

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Software problems tend to evolve over time into philosophy problems, a point that's come up in a few Diff pieces, like the Antithesis writeup and Asana's ontology-as-a-service ($). In this particular category, it's the philosophy of work and vocation: a bond trader, accountant, or social media manager doesn't necessarily have to spend much time nav... See more

Even as the personal computer and then the phone made it onto the desktop and into the hands of most every single employee regardless of job, the structure, organization, and processes of a company continued to mirror those of the 20th century.

Anyone who’s spent a few months at a sizable tech company can tell you that a lot of software seems to exist primarily because companies have hired people to write and maintain them. In some ways, the software serves not the business, but the people who have written it, and then those who need to maintain it. This is stupid, but also very, very tru... See more