Trying to get buy in from developers to stop using Slack and move to Campfire (assumption is that Basecamp is one of the best ways to manage Shape Up). Getting pushback. I feel like using Basecamp has made doing Shape Up a lot easier. That said, I want to move all communication to Basecamp.Thoughts on how to do this given concerns around alert integrations being harder/takes more time to do in Basecamp and attachment to Slack medium in general?
Personally I don’t think that decision has a ton to do with Shape Up but my thoughts on Slack can be summed up in general by an antipattern we call “Semi Ephemeral Chat” Posted it below since it’s short
Overview
Chat applications with no opinions about whether messages are meant to be transient.
Leads to bad habits and confusion about how important information is presented and organized. It is all too easy to identify circumstances in which information should be stored in an accessible document and instead is constantly distributed to others via Slack (or other chat applications) during live, repetitive Q&A discourse.
Solutions
Change your Slack workspace’s message retention settings to just a few days. Yes, your history will be permanently deleted. Give teams some time to properly organize if it’s really that bad. See Writing Stack. If the Q&A format is best, try Stack Overflow Teams.
1 Like
Agree, and very interesting perspective and blog. Tons of value there.
I was hoping to maybe get more perspective from the developer community here on how doing Shape Up in Basecamp fairs for them, specifically when using Campfire (no Slacking on the side).
1 Like
Yeah no one wants to use Campfire. We gave on up that idea a long time ago.
2 Likes
For us the biggest barrier would probably be that most of the company does not use Basecamp, so we’d still need Slack lol
I share a few details here.
1 Like
How do you run Shape Up using Basecamp without Campfire? You are managing communication across Slack and BC Message Boards, etc.?
yeah Basecamp doesn’t have a monopoly on Shape up 
We did a cycle or two in Basecamp in late-2019 when Shape Up dropped. But then we designed a process that works for us in Monday.com:
(if that link doesn’t work, try it in Incognito)
https://voice.whiterabbitexpress.com/forget-basecamp-how-to-implement-shape-up-in-monday-com-539be2193542?source=friends_link&sk=49f36d74be042e9714f0ed6f7ce4e2f4
More recently we’ve started using Notion as a tool to capture our raw ideas, shaped up pitches, and to organize our tasks into cycles (projects).
Shape up defines a set of practices and attitudes, but there are many different ways to implement those ideas. I think Basecamp is a nice idea poorly implemented. Notion gives you many great building blocks which you can use to put together a nice workflow.
- you have a central database for raw ideas, but each person can embed a link to that database in their own area and filter on their own ideas–essentially creating a distributed raw ideas local view (that might sound weird if you’re not familiar with Notion’s database and linked database model.
- a document in notion, such as a shaped up pitch, can also be moved into a “project” database as a “task” (cycle)
maybe I should write up a “how to do shape up in Notion” article one of these days…
Maybe today is the day.
Seeing how low mass documentation works by moving pitches from workspace to message boards into other workspace message boards, automatic check-ins, and so on can be captured could be cool.
here’s something from a friend of mine:
My team takes a different approach, but maybe there are some useful ideas here.
1 Like