Sean Johnson - Intentionally - The Education of Sean Johnson

I just blew up Basecamp.

Our company had been searching for a project management solution for a long time before I first joined the team. They had evaluated the pros and cons of Microsoft Project and other tools, and had deemed them all too user-unfriendly for their purposes.

In I trotted with the diea that we use Basecamp, then a fairly new tool on the market. It’s brand promise is that project management will be painless - the interface is elegant, it doesn’t take any time to train new users, and it allowed us to keep in contact with our clients on a regular basis. The company embraced the idea, and I looked like a genius.

Fast forward to today - we’ve been using Basecamp for almost a year now, and every project we’ve started (roughly 250 of them) are in the system. As much as possible, we’ve moved away from email communication to posting messages and attachments on Basecamp. It was a little hairy (think 150 late milestones greeting you every morning, 150 to-do’s that someone in the company has to update every day,) but it got the job done.

Until yesterday.

I’ve long had a reputation for doing something first, then asking for permission. Usually it makes me look like the proverbial ‘go-getter.’ But sometimes it blows up in my face.

We had a server that wasn’t being utilized much. It seemed like the perfect repository for all the files we’d be storing in Basecamp (nearly 8 gigs as of last week.) So of course I set this up without asking for permission, without really notifying anyone. Why deal with IT and all the headaches that comes with? I had the access info to set everything up myself - let them deal with the 30 other things they have going on.

Yesterday, they shut down the underutilized server. And every file that’s ever been stored on Basecamp - every design mockup, every revision of copy, every data set - was wiped off the face of the earth.

We were able to back it up after discovering the problem, and we have the 8 gigs of files in safe hands. But clients can’t get to them. And since we used Basecamp, and agreeing to what amounts to a ‘use at your risk’ policy in doing so, we can’t make any modifications to the file paths to represent the new location of said files.

I’ve learned three lessons in the past 24 hours.

1. There is a definite downside to a limited customer service model.
2. As much as it pains you, it probably makes sense to talk with IT before making minor decisions…like where to store every piece of client communication your company has.
3. I’m going to be fired within a week.