One indis­pens­able piece of soft­ware that I use both per­son­ally as well as in my day job is a project/time man­age­ment soft­ware pack­age called Base­camp. First, a quote from 37 Sig­nals, the com­pany that made Basecamp:

For years project man­age­ment soft­ware was about charts, graphs, and stats. And you know what? It didn’t work. Pic­tures and num­bers don’t get projects done. Base­camp tack­les project man­age­ment from an entirely dif­fer­ent angle: A focus on com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion. Base­camp brings peo­ple together.

In my own busi­ness, Base­camp func­tions as my to-do list. For any major project, I setup a to-do list of things I need to get done:

Mak­ing a List

Typ­i­cally at the begin­ning of a project I’ll just throw in every­thing I can think of and not worry about order or assign­ing due dates. At this point I just want to get every­thing out of my head and onto the list so I don’t for­get anything.

After I’ve got every­thing I can think of in the list, I’ll quickly arrange the list in the order I think I need to tackle it. For appro­pri­ate tasks, you can assign a due date so that it’s eas­ier to remem­ber if some­thing needs to get done by or on a cer­tain day.

Time Track­ing

For Lemon Pro­duc­tions projects I don’t worry too much about time track­ing in Base­camp — I track that in Fresh­Books (watch for another sep­a­rate post) — but at my day job we use time track­ing to make sure projects stay on bud­get. It works great and takes only a few min­utes at the end of the day to enter the time for the projects you were work­ing on. At a glance, my boss can eas­ily deter­mine where we are in a project rel­a­tive to where we should be and plan for any extra time needed from a client. (Note: Time track­ing isn’t avail­able on the free plan or the basic plan, which is $24/month. You need to be using at least the Plus plan at $49/month or higher to get time track­ing enabled.)

Com­mu­ni­cat­ing

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion done inside Base­camp can be han­dled through email or directly inside the web appli­ca­tion. This makes for an easy way for every­body (or only spe­cific peo­ple) to keep up on what’s being dis­cussed with­out hav­ing to have long, hard to read forwarded/reply-to-all style email con­ver­sa­tions. A life­saver for some orga­ni­za­tions to be sure.

Tem­plates

Tem­plates are great way to build a default list or project that you can reuse for dif­fer­ent projects, over and over. If you always have the same 10 tasks when, for exam­ple, design­ing and writ­ing your email newslet­ter every month, then you could cre­ate a project tem­plate that would auto­mat­i­cally have every to-do item setup for you. All you have to do is actu­ally write the newsletter!

Other Fea­tures

Other things that are included that we don’t use a lot yet (but prob­a­bly should) are things like:

• Mile­stones. Mile­stones are due dates for whole projects.
• Write­boards. Write­boards allow you to cre­ate a col­lab­o­ra­tive doc­u­ment (like a Word doc­u­ment) which every­one can edit and add/remove con­tent from. It’s a lot like using Google Docs which is where I usu­ally would do this kind of work. But it can be handy to have it all in one place in Basecamp.
• Camp­fire is an inter­nal chat/instant mes­sag­ing util­ity. It’s not all that dif­fer­ent from some­thing like Win­dows Mes­sen­ger, Google Chat or iChat except that it’s a group chat only for peo­ple involved with your Basecamp/Campfire setup and all con­ver­sa­tions are logged so it’s easy to go back and see what every­one was chat­ting about while you were off last week. Assum­ing you want to know.

Rec­om­men­da­tion

Whether Base­camp is for you will depend on the amount of peo­ple and the amount of money your busi­ness is mak­ing. For small to medium sized groups the $49/month plan is really what you need, par­tic­u­larly if you need to do time track­ing. If time track­ing isn’t nec­es­sary, the $24/month basic plan should suf­fice for most busi­nesses — at least ini­tially. If you’re not sure, or you’re oper­at­ing on your own, be sure to check out the free plan hid­ing on the signup page:

Your Thoughts

Be sure to leave a com­ment with your thoughts or rec­om­men­da­tions for what soft­ware you like to use to track lists, time or project man­age­ment. I’d love to hear it and try some­thing new out!