Basecamp – What a great tool!

Posted by Jesse Kliza in Business, Collaboration

I recently started using Basecamp, and I must say it’s really a great tool. Simple by design, it has everything you need and nothing you don’t.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with it, Basecamp is a collaboration tool created by 37Signals. It was originally created to manage their own internal projects, and then became the incredibly popular collaboration tool that it is today.

It is designed to be a simple and easy to use tool that allows teams to organize information related to things (projects) they are working on together.

Like any application however, it can be the greatest thing in the world, but if it is not used properly it won’t provide you with any benefit.

Here are some basic guidelines that I came up with, to ensure that you use Basecamp (or really most of the collaboration tools out there) most effectively:

1) Use it – Everyone on your team should commit to using it. The sooner the better. The more everyone gets used to working in Basecamp to collaborate, the quicker it will become second nature.

2) Input things that are related to a project in Basecamp, rather than sending an email – Messages can be created, and everyone will be notified by email anyway. The benefit over simply sending an email to everyone is that the message, along with all the responses, comments, etc, now lives next to all of the other messages, files, tasks, etc, related to that project.

It brings clarity to the process.

3) Create writeboards for documents that are being reviewed and revised to ensure that you don’t have multiple versions of the documents content – This also allows everyone involved to quickly and easily make revisions and comments. The system will automatically keep track of the versions, and allow you to compare different versions at any time.

4) Create milestones first then to-dos – Milestones are deliverables, or tasks which have a due date. Many times milestones have a number of items (to-dos) that need to happen, leading up to them, so by creating the milestones first, you can then relate the to-do lists to the appropriate milestones.

These guidelines are very basic and simple (in keeping with the essence of what Basecamp is intended to be), but provide a good foundation for helping to define ones own process for using a tool such as Basecamp effectively.