As I am exposed to all these fantastic new tools - I am longing for an environment to test them out and implement. Ah, that shiny new system smell - all the productivity promise it brings. The 37 signals suite looks very promising, particularly the base camp, backpack and campfire applications. They seem to naturally blend knowledge management, collaboration and project management into a causal, friendly feeling UI and process flow. Of course - the demos look slick and the testimonials are glowing, but there seems to be some substance there. Also marketing to my heart - is the hip, funky, boutique-y feel to the app and the company as a whole.
I work for a really big company (made up of large sub companies~ 180k) and the app I work on has to fit a really broad range of needs and be approved by a large set of clients. In some ways, it is really interesting to work at this level - a window on the training activity of the entire enterprise. My metrics are big, my reports have loads of users and I have a slew of "super user" clients.
In some ways - because it must meet so many requirements - it waters down and dulls some of the sharpest aspects of the software. There are whole suites of tools we bought we can not use, because they would not be scalable. In our enterprise situation, processes and decisions are made all or nothing - it must suit all or can not be done.
I recently hit my ten year mark at my company. I looked over my resume and saw that the first 3 years - when I was working with a much smaller audience (6k)- I really got a lot more done than in my past 3. When I started, the department was new and processes had to be built everywhere - we were making up our structure as we went along. Now, in a more mature orginization, processes are improved, tweeked, the possiblity to implement a suite of apps like 37 signals has passed me by.
I feel envy for all of you who say your team is just getting started down this path - you have so many cool new tools to use and platforms to build that will take you to the next step. Enjoy it while you can.
I agree with what you wrote here. There are many advantages of working for a big corporate, simultaneously, there are many disadvantages of working in such mature corporate too, where all processes and levels required lots of detail planning and approval from different departments! I mean we are talking in a big scale where thousands of users who could be affected by any new or changed implementation, even a small change may possibly frightening many users who engage directly with the application. I’ve been working in a small and large company too, and surely, there are many distinctions, both good and bad in different ways. :-)
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