As a side note, why is it that whatever Very Smart organizational system using Trello or Asana that we have set up in our own lives, or in our company, (and now I have your company as a second example), when shit gets real it comes down to the "real" list which is a spreadsheet or in my personal case a text file? What does that say about our Very Smart organizational system?
In my experience, a team can run on just-in-time planning, the one simple task list, and the experience of their senior people for quite some time. It's even Agile: People, not processes. But what we lose is the ability to grow more senior people for when we run out of the ones we have just now.
The Very Smart organisational systems have inefficiencies, but they also have affordances. And more importantly, they have the structure to let multiple people poke at them at the same time, and allow people to learn and make mistakes without (normally) breaking everything that's currently in-progress.
Trying to run for too long on the one "real" list is a recipe for burnout and tech debt. And ensuring the team is using the right model at any given point in time is an art I'm not entirely sure I've mastered.
1. Some things done in everyday practice have big inefficiencies, or give the illusion of productivity and progress, and desperation can force a team to realize that.
2. A lot of tools are driven by enterprise sales, which means they target needs of large companies with very different needs than a startup-like team (in which it's easier to have everyone on the same page, aligned, and barriers removed).
3. A lot of tools are driven by enterprise sales, which can mean that the people who select and approve them aren't the people with experience using them. (And sometimes a team is forced to use poor tools, with adverse impact on effectiveness and morale, and then you get into a budget meeting, and see the SaaS fees the company is paying for those tears (TaaS).)
4. There are definitely projects I can't handle in a spreadsheet (most of them). But, when SHTF, and priorities change, the number of things you're focused on gets smaller and more in everyone's heads, the spreadsheet or text file might be most rapid to work with. (For SHTF deadline-hitting in another, much larger, startup, I would've forced everything into a canonical Gantt chart, just because the interdependencies were too complex, and declared the tons of Jira sprint Issues and manual team reports to be confusing and time-wasting noise, and everyone works&reports first from the Gantt.)
When I imagine a spreadsheet or text file for managing a project, in my mind I am picturing a lot of items on one screen of text. With very little "chrome" or extra whitespace, or needing to navigate across several screens to get the whole picture. Or learn specific tool features to get the view you want. And the simplicity of just adding a column to your spreadsheet, vs figuring out where to fit the new data point into the existing ticket structure.
