Cataloguing the Different Ways the Mind Associates Itself with the Outliner Presented Screen

Posted by Foolness
Sep 10, 2012 at 07:20 PM

Yes, there have been web services that have been simulating Kanban but I’d be careful in claiming they are superior.

Trello and Flow.IO are the most popular as far as I know but I didn’t mention them by name because they aren’t that superior in concept except in technical features. At the same time, I wanted to avoid an argument on this because, as I said, I’m no Kanban user.

My hinted evidence as to why they are flawed can be found in this image:

http://www.infoq.com/resource/articles/agile-kanban-boards/en/resources/Fig1_task-board.jpg

This will not scale in either services and yet we aren’t even in depth Kanban theory conversation here. Merely a basic sticky notes corkboard based around a non-personal information intended usage.

This is the tricky thing about Kanban. It’s not about the board alone. In fact, the board is limited by design in order to promote Agile movement.

For further evidence as to why such powerful services are unable to simulate the true Kanban experience in anything but name and web collaborative features, check out both Pigeonhole Organizer and TreeSheets and compare their power to both services.

Even if the argument is that web services are supposed to be inferior to desktop software, I’d bet my money that if an experienced Kanban group would be forced to use these web services alone using the Kanban process, they’d get more practical work done signing up for a single user account of Teux Deux than they’d get from something like Trello. This doesn’t mean Trello does not provide an important and special one of a kind web service. Far from it. It’s very good. Good is different from comparative though. It would be on the level of putting a turtle shell of features on an agile method and calling it a superior agile method because it goes away from the agile paradigm.

In fact as far as web services go, Google Calendar is much better at recreating and unconsciously motivating it’s users to experience the Kanban style of thinking without them needing to know or realize it because it mimics a work style much closer to the paradigm rather than going away from it.

As for who I consider outliner experts, it would have to be those that consider themselves an outliner expert. Redundant, I know, but let us not forget that the user who claimed to be an expert in that recent thread did not cite only him but threw the claim out that one blog poster is trying to protect his stake as the resident expert in this forum and also cited a Kant professor whom he obviously considered an expert. I too thought that there were only power users here but if people are willing to consider themselves as experts then it’s high time to make a thread that helps them establish their credibility as experts. It would be better for them in the future and it would be better for the community as a whole to understand why they may be infatuated with the more mundane and lengthy subjects of theory.