Basecamp: Card Table, our take on Kanban
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 30 июл 2024
- New in Basecamp 4 is the Card Table tool, our take on Kanban. Not content just doing what everyone else has done, we've layered in a number of practical, everyday, common sense improvements and innovations that eliminate a number of hacks people usually have to deal with to get Kanban to do what they want.
Questions? Drop 'em below and we'll get you answers. Have a suggestion for another video about Basecamp or HEY? Comment below and we'll try to get that done as well.
Haven't tried Basecamp yet? Sign up free here: basecamp.com.
Thanks again! 
Наука
We are intrigued by this and hope to incorporate it, but the biggest question, as many have asked already, is how does this work with "to-dos"? Can we turn a card into a to-do and move it to a to-do list? You said in the write-up about this feature," Card Tables aren't a replacement for To-dos or another way to visualize them-they're for working in a different way. Mix and match To-dos and Card Tables however works best for you." Can you show us examples of that?
You mentioned somewhere else that to do list is different than card table and that they can be used together. Could you elaborate more on this and provide practical examples? I understand card table is more about workflow/phase but both are about getting work done. Since to do list has hill chart feature, it would be wonderful to see how to do list / hill chart / card table all play out together in a single project. Thanks!
Yes, my thoughts exactly. How can I use this in conjunction with my to-do list? I am sure there are ways, I just need help thinking of them!
It seems to me that you should be able to link a To-do or a To-do list to a card (or maybe even a project), but I can't see that option.
@@dawnmesserly441 Came here to suggest exactly the same, it seems to be the obvious step, otherwise we're creating silo's of disconnected and duplicated information in our projects. Linking the to-do lists to the cards provides real value.
@@phillipsellars3326 there is a 3rd party tool that does this already - not sure if that's the barrier? Seems like an obvious option but I'd expect the reason for the silo must exist.
I was looking for a to do list on the cards too with recurring dates if needed
Great addition and nice implementation. It is how we like to use Kanban. The fact that to-do's and card table are 2 different things however, is an oversight as far as I'm concerned. I don't believe there is really a valid reason to have 2 different ways of coping with work in a project. It seems to me that To Do and Card tables is just the same thing, but To Do only have 2 statussen, being 'open' or 'closed'. Apart from that they are the same thing, just a different view on work. Like mentioned in other comments (and actually how other competitors have implemented this), I believe the 2 should be interchangeable. It will easy the pain for many who want to start using Card tabels so they don't need to convert all existing to do list (and loose track of what has been done in the past if you only transfer open to do's, just like the example in your section about bugs). It was a long missing feature in Basecamp so we're very glad it is available now, but making Todo's and Card Table interchangeable would make it almost perfect.
totally agree
I gave feedback and said the same thing. They think people, at least at this point, will still want to use todos for "one off" items that don't really have a process, while the cards will be for process-oriented things. I know it's hard to get my organization using any system period, so they would be confused I think with having both "todos" to look at and "cards". I do like the cards and Kanban and have used such a system (wasn't basecamp) in a process-oriented environment and it worked well.
Watch their discussion here as it addresses some of this: ruclips.net/video/GSUjnBnYbGI/видео.html
Cards tables and to-dos can be the same but they can also be very different. As an example, we may have a card that says 'Deploy client A's website' but then go to To-dos, or checklist, which has 20+ things to check and tick off as part of the deployment.
I second other people who commented below re. connecting the To-Do list to the Card Table. Adding a numbering system would also be awesome. Thank you!
We recently moved some of our non-dev projects from JIRA over to Basecamp, specifically because you added the card table feature. Our only regret about making that move is that cards aren’t numbered, which deprives us of the verbal shortcut of referring to tasks by card number, rather than title. This is very helpful, especially when we’re discussing multiple card with similar terms in their titles. Being able to refer to “731” or “729”, instead of “A task like this” versus “A task like that” eliminates ambiguity and cuts down on errors and confusion.
As always, a well thought out take on Kanban that will be useful in the real world - great job
Thanks Jon! -JF
Excellent addition, we had been using lists to achieve this now we have the real thing.
Great video. How can you connect a to-do list to the card table? We have hundreds of to-do list items that would be great to just important or connect right into the card table. Or do we just have to input them one by one? I think other people may have asked this questions as well.
@37signals I have the same question. I would love to move To Do's over to card table with out manually having to bring over current comments etc. Is this possible?
We love using the Card Tables - thank you! One thing that isn't super clear to me is who gets notified at the different stages of a project. I understand when you add your name to a column that you'll get notified of things added, but if there a graphic way or easy way to see who will see or get the next notification when you move a Card to another column. Thanks!
Really an amazing addition - can’t wait to use it ❤
Thanks thanks!
Quite a bit to unpack actually in this seemingly innocent feature. Very nice explanation of the thinking behind the feature. I wasn't getting there myself with some quick trial and error. This video helped. Reading through the Comments, people will eventually figure out when to use ToDo's and when to use Card Tables.
I'd love to know how Card Tables is affecting To-Do list usage inside Basecamp. What determines if you use a To-Do lis or a Card table?
I would think to-do lists are for simpler sets of work, like content edits on a website.
But honestly, I think a lot of my own work would end up in card tables.
I've got soooo many To-dos that should be Cards. I've tried to construct To-do lists in such a way as to mimic the flow that is now so nicely built into the Card Table. Where's the "convert this To-do to a card" options? Please don't tell me I need to copy and paste to create several hundred new cards ....
We currently use Trello. Compared to that, I would miss a way to filter visible cards (there can be an overwhelming amount of cards and thus a filter is useful). Also I’d miss a way to add some kind of tags to a card (which also could be used in the before mentioned filter). I know there are workarounds for tags, like having specific columns or such, but I think tags are more universally useful. Cheers, Stefan.
I think it's not there on purpose. Labels or filters are not the solution. There is always more work than we can do. You need either to say no to more things or split those to smaller projects.
This is so exciting!!!!!
Great work as always!
The team appreciates that, thanks.
I had used Basecamp years ago and would occasionally dip in to see what "innovation" it might now have introduced. I always admired the team's drive for simplicity but I could never stick with it due to a lack of essential features I needed and the lack of intuitive usability. I am a user experience professional so I may have pet peeves over user interaction that one might expect as standard especially when it comes to sophisticated management software. Recently, I was wondering what new features it now may have for it to be finally my studio management tool of choice. When I saw this card table I immediately signed up again as this is exactly what I was looking for to replicate my real world kanban with post its on my wall. I quickly started generating a To-Do list for a new project to test it and got carried away listing 20+ items for the end-to-end project requirements. But for the life of me, couldn't find the optiuon to convert my list items to a cards view. I had to google and found this video. To discover that I may have to re-type all those tasks in a new sub-tool, not to mention I have to "enable" it first, annoyed me like no other "progressive" app in recent memory. Not having the option to convert tasks into kanban or conversely switch a kanban to list view is a huge turnoff and frankly a failure for a new feature announcement. This is why Airtable and others will continue to have more allure and why I always end up dropping Basecamp and not recommending it eventually.
Thank you for making this video. I'd like to suggest to BC to provide an option to have Not Now and Done display a little larger with preview text so that people can better see that there are items in those buckets. Right now, the eye can easily gloss over those columns and not see them at all because they are so far off to the side, but our team members need it more obvious to see that there are important items in those buckets
I think that's the point. If you've decided 'Not now' for a card, then you don't need to be focusing on it and have it in your immediate view to distract you. Have a process to review the Not nows from time to time. JMO.
Thanks for this -- exciting to think about applications for my work. Can you describe or demo how due dates work within Card Table? I don't think I saw a card in the demo video that had a due date assigned...that field was blank for all the cards in the demo.
It's good addition to have this Kanban style tool. But it feels to me they kinda separate system within the Basecamp itself. I become confused when to use the main system (board, todo) and when to use the Card Table to manage a project. They should be interconnected
It’s a huge bummer that you can’t transform a list into a card table. And you also can’t move items from a list to a card table. So if you have a big list that you want to turn into a card table it’s a ton of manual work.
Best advice is to keep things where they are and start using Card Tables moving forward. Spending time converting, transitioning, and trying to find parity between two different features generally isn’t time well spent. Everything as it was, and then, moving forward, set things up with the new capability you have.
This is how we’ve done it at 37signals and it’s worked out really well. Everything spent moving forward, nothing spent moving sideways. And before you know it, you’ll have things the way you want it simply because time moves on.
Is there a way to use the card table but also have some context related on schedule/off schedule? I think like a gantt style timeline with milestones.
Great stuff.
I noticed that you use card table in a very meaningful way. When do use to do use versus the steps of a card? Can you explain that in more detail?
Is there any connectivity between your cards and todos to prevent duplicate info? It seems like it would start getting information put in two locations if we have to create a card that is technically a to do in addition to creating it as a to do its proper location in the project. Or are you saying that an item that needs accomplished that is on a card would not be found anywhere in a to do list? Seems to me like a card should actually be an automatically updated replication of a to do so that it stays exactly the same whether you're interacting with it in a to do list or in the card view. A.k.a. if I make a comment on a card, that comment automatically shows up in its to do when I click on it in its to do list. Sorry it's so long I just wanted to make sure you knew what I was talking about by saying it in different ways. I can tell it will be weird if we have some todos showing up as cards and other ones not as cards. It's gonna start disconnecting items in a to do lists or people will put it in both the list and as a card and I'm sure you know what happens after that
What would make sense RE: cards/to-do's is creating lists that are procedurally created/managed from cards. The cards should control workflow population not act as an aside.
Each of our clients is their own project. I would love to be able to to have a layer where we could put projects in a card table. Currently we have a project with a card table where we name each client and have a link to their project card.
Yes!! I was so excited to hear this, but ... BUT I'm so disappointed to hear that I cannot set up a template I can use across multiple projects. I'd have to recreate the card table every time. Ugh.
You CAN create a project template that has a card table and use that template across multiple projects. Add the cards you want to the template and then when you spin up a new project, use that project template and all the cards you pre-loaded into your template will be in the new project! Email our team at guides@basecamp.com if you need more help with that! -Kimberly
Awesome, the 37S-additions to Kanban are great (and would be greater, if it fully worked on iPad 😉).
How do you deal with subtasks? What if a card needs several steps to be done?
For now, you'd just detail them in the comments, but I could see us adding "steps" (essentially a simple to-do list on a card) down the road. We'll see! -JF
@@37signals 🙏 Thanks!
@@37signals - That would be great! 🙌 I’m sure you’ll come up with something helpful and elegant.
A to Do like groups can be added to cards. It would be so much useful.
It would be great if the sub text was the due date vs. who and when the card was opened!
Hey Jason - would really to see/implement your take on Gantt Charting as well...? Thnaks!
Why do you press the button "Save card"?
How does one set keyboard shortcuts in your software?
I really like being able to “watch” specific columns (including triage). Can already think of a few use cases where that would be useful. Great work on this whole feature 👍
One quality of life improvement idea is I wish I could use the icon that assigns a card to myself to also quickly assign a card to others, rather than having to go into the card to do it. This would be especially useful for managing bugs. Just a thought.
Thanks Aylon. We considered the quick assign to someone else, and we may explore it more down the road, but the “I got it” convenience of a single click felt like a bigger win for the moment.
I love this feature, really *really* love it but @15:21 shows a little bit of one of the challenges I have when using it. You have a column called "ready for the cycle", and the way these cards work, you get a headline look at some work that's being done, but frequently, that work needs to become a component of another project. In this case, let's use "Undo Send" as an example, here it's in The Product Strategy project, but when it's Ready for the Cycle it presumably needs to be re-created within the "Cycle 8" project (for example).
So how do you guys actually do this? Does someone re-create all the content from the Card the new project? I feel a way to link Cards into other projects would be a super useful feature ( Obsidian comes to mind as a super easy, yet very powerful way to deploy this).
Hey Jason and 37signals, can you add the 'send this to someone' option to Cards? To-dos have this option, but not cards, and enabling this option on Cards would be convenient. Thanks. 🙏
So "Triage" is a new name for "Backlog", and "Not Now" is a new name for "On hold".
Hey Jason, anyway to trigger cards to be created automatically from a to-do? Or via zapier into the card table?
Love Kanban! (Use Trello personally) BUT I don't see how to make more than one Card Table show up? There's no obvious option to do so. Will inquire on HELP.
Templates? We use ToDo templates as outlines for repetivie tasks, and it is a time-saver. Do you expect the ability to have a default set of cards a a template in Triage, that could be the used to simply project creation?
Once a card has been worked through the card table can you convert the card to a "project". Example : using card table in a "leads " project, working the leads through a card table proceess then on the leads that are successful converting those cards into their own project.
Well, as far as Kanban goes and blocked I don’t think having a blocked column is the way to go. What I usually do in this case is add a flag/marker so the team knows its blocked. Or a team member does. When its unblocked it can continue.
Different teams do it different ways, but we wanted to create a distinct workflow and space for those items. It's like how some people mark read emails in Gmail as "unread" so they remember to deal with them later, but in HEY we built a distinct workflow called "Reply Later" so people don't have to go through the messy read/unread hack. "On Hold" in Card Tables in Basecamp 4 is our answer to "maybe we move it to another column, maybe we flag it, maybe we tag it". "On Hold" is a distinct answer to the common question of "where do we put this thing that's not moving forward at the moment?" -JF
I would like to copy a card to use on the next project. I have broken down the product creation (technical report) into steps to keep the process in order inside a card (task). Is there a way to copy a card and use it on another project? btw....I am a new employee of a company that uses BC. thanks....I like it.
Can the card tables be viewed by individual user as well as project?
What program do you use to record your screen and your webcam at the same time?
Why do your URL and mine start with 3?
Why "on hold" instead of flagging or marking on the spot? Sometimes the card's relative position to other cards can be important.
Sometimes it can be, and you can always rename and add an emoji to the beginning if that's what you'd prefer, but we think On Hold is the more elegant, useful solution. If something's on pause, it's not on play - everything else in the column is on play. It feels better to take it out of the stream, but still keep it in the column, so you can move on with the other things while the stuff that's On Hold waits on the sidelines. -JF
How would you name a git branch here? Since card doesn't seems to have a unique numbering system?
Why do you press the button "Save changes"?
We don't need buttons for saving input.