[Massplanners] Clickup or related software (John Fay Jr)

[Nathan Chung]

Dear John,
Outside of work, I had a brief experience with ClickUp with a community
business group, mostly volunteers. I don't want to get too specific to
avoid naming anybody. The result was not successful since it was mostly
volunteers and the software added another layer of burden to the existing
software ecosystem. Asana is a competitor to ClickUp you might consider if
you haven't. From my experience, regardless of the platform, people need to
explore the platform before committing to them and really look into 1) how
it will disrupt the current workflow and 2) whether integrating the
software and learning it will be too much of a burden for staff. Don't
trust the software salespeople. They have to downplay the time and cost
burden and the design and bug defects to sell the software.

With the community business group, our software ecosystem already had
emails, Zoom, Google Groups, Google Drive (with docs and spreadsheets), the
main website on WordPress, AND a second internal website on Google Sites
to communicate and store information. You can imagine how things could go
badly since communication and documents were scattered all over the place,
and people had to maintain multiple different platforms. The problem with
introducing ClickUp was that it added another layer of burden, was not very
intuitive, and while some training was provided by a volunteer member who
pushed for the software, the learning curve seemed high, especially for a
volunteer group. And the seductive comment feature for each project task
turned out to be a blackhole of tiring comments.

The group ended up losing most of the volunteers, including myself. To me,
the work and meeting burdens seemed too much for a community business with
a low likelihood of success.

I am not disparaging the software. Project management software well
designed and well used can have a lot of benefits. I just want to emphasize
that integrating it well into the office workflow takes time and planning,
and rushing it will likely cause problems. People need to take ownership
and set up rules and guidelines if multiple people will be using it.

Nathan Chung, Grants Administrator
Office of Planning & Sustainability for the City of Northampton
nchung at northamptonma.gov; (413) 587-1262
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