This exceedingly long-winded titled book is another Basecamp book. Basecamp is a company run by D.H.H. The OG creator of the Rails half of Ruby on Rails. As someone who primarily operates in the rails universe, it seemed only right to set several books from Basecamp and DHH into my reading list. However, I found this book to be slightly disappointing.
With a dozen and half different project management designs, from Waterfall, Kanban, and Scrum, this book describes their version of how to tackle projects that were detailed and clear. Yet the process they use, however effectively just feels like a small cycle waterfall with an emphasis on team ownership.
The concept of shaping work before you start doing the work is a solid idea. The general idea is that you would make some rough designs and sketch out the functionality you are about to do, to properly shape the work. There are 3 main stages of shaped work:
- The initial design is rough
- The problem has been solved and well thought out, with any questions resolved
- It is bounded in scope and that scope is locked.
Another aspect of Shape that I can get behind is Breadboarding which is a way to sketch out a flow for a solution to a problem, showing all the critical parts of the problem without being affected by the final design. Function over Form.
The big problem I have with shape-up is the weird relationship when it comes to teams. They layout that there are essentially two different teams, one that decides what to solve and designs a solution, then there is another team that essentially implements whatever is written into the project. The removal of collaboration of the implementors and the planners on a project seems extremely dangerous.
So, in summary, I wouldn’t recommend the overall process that Singer recommends in Shape Up, but there were still some tidbits of wisdom within. I don’t recommend reading this one.
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