Before Basecamp, there were a lot of small work-related discussions that happened in personal iMessage threads between coworkers, but that stuff shouldn’t live there. Pings are a direct messaging system-like the Campfire tool, except one-on-one. Global FunctionalityĪbove the unit-based portion of Basecamp, you have four other areas that work across the entire account. Similarly, you can set up Project templates if you find yourself reusing a certain setup for similar kinds of work. The modularity of this setup means that each Project can have its own configuration of active tools in a custom order that makes sense for the task at hand. Email Forwards: a custom email address that you can forward any message to messages appear in the project and have their own discussion thread, and replies can be sent directly from within Basecamp.Docs & Files: a full file storage solution, with file versioning, discussion threads, and the ability to make native “docs” with basic formatting.Automatic Check-Ins: an automated prompt you can set up to ask people for progress reports, or anything else, with answers collected in one spot.Schedule: an internal calendar system for marking milestones, due dates, or meetings.To-Dos: the familiar task management system, with lists, assignable tasks, dates, and discussion threads.Message Board: a forum-like system for more deliberate discussions, proposals, and ideas.Campfire: a project-specific group chat, like Slack but built into your project management environment.Within each Project or Team, you have 7 tools that can be selectively activated or deactivated, depending on the needs of that unit. A small creative agency like mine has a single Team called Partners that we use for internal communication, and then each client project gets its own Project. This gives you the option to set up the structure in a way that makes sense for your organization.Ī large software organization might have an Engineering Team and a Marketing Team and use Projects as milestones or feature sprints. These units are either Projects or Teams, but the distinction is semantic-all of Basecamp’s tools are available either way. Structureīasecamp is organized into units, each of which can have a customizable set of tools active within it. There are countless features that people want, but only a few they actually need.īattle tested with thousands of clients over several major iterations, Basecamp is now sitting at version 3, which attempts to distill project management to its essence. It turns out that the lesson to be learned about how people actually get work done together (not just how they aspire to) is that it’s simple. The company turns twenty years old next year, which means they’ve had a lot of time to refine their vision for what an ideal project management environment looks like. Most offerings go for inclusiveness, trying to cram in every possible feature, view, and option so that all kinds of people can customize it to their liking. Since every person in an organization has their own approach to getting things done, building software to help people be productive together is a daunting task.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |