Project management is a little bit more than emails and Word documents

Picture it: the year 2000 on the beginning of the slide down the rough side the dot-com bubble. My boss, an obnoxious but insightful-in-retrospect Brit forwarded me a bunch of emails between a client and our company's IT team and tasked me with "cleaning up the emails" for the client. After a rough, confused start in which the technical team basically refused to help me because they thought the project was stupid, my boss said, "Listen, just throw the emails into a Word document, put in a table of contents, format it a bit and we'll send that to them and see what they think." 

It can't possibly be that easy, I thought. And yet, it was. The client was thrilled with version one and we were back in their good graces. It made no sense to me, but I was happy to be done.

It wasn't until I was on the client end that I realized what had happened with that project: the client's technical questions had been answered in emails, but in order to refer to the information, they had to dig through their archived emails, find the email that contained the answer (which almost always started with RE: and where the answer was often 3 or four emails into the discussion), and cross reference it with the other emails. Plus, if they wanted to pass on the knowledge, they'd have to forward every single one of the emails. It was, to dramatically understate it, inefficient. And so all they wanted was for us to take that information and put it in a single, shareable document where the question came before the answer. Simple, but effective.

This story from eleven years ago springs to mind because I'm currently working on a project in which the project management is exactly that: all tasks being done in emails (all of which have between 3-7 people CCed), multiple versions of documents being sent as attachments. There's no centralized documents, notes, knowledge base, task lists or event calendar. And this is from a huge company that should be better at it than this.

We now have Sharepoint, Google Docs and Basecamp among hundreds of other project management tools, and yet we're still trying to do projects like we were in the days of dialup. And that's sad.