A good product
I have been playing with Basecamp over the past couple of days. I am impressed. I love bang for the buck. Basecamp seems to be a fairly simple product that can really put the life back into a team.
Basecamp is a project collaboration tool. It allows you to basically run several blog style conversations about the projects that your team is working on. It features a calendar for putting up milestones, and events and the like. You can also set up to-do lists.
I am relatively cynical about project management in the workplace. I think that we make it quite a bit more complicated than it really is. There is a tendancy to manage people to their maximum effieciency, and often over-efficiency on a local scale breeds inefficiency on a global scale. If I am scheduled to be working on my projects for 90 percent of my time, then it will take me 9 days to catch up for a single sick day or day spent dealing with Murphy. In this environment every event impacts timelyness of completing what needs to be done.
I think the trick to being successful is to make sure everyone knows what needs to be done, and keep everyone working on something that needs to be done. if you plan too much more than that, you are inviting Murphy to make the hours you put into planning totally wasted.
Basecamp looks like it will be quite effective at making sure that you have the tools to let your team know what is being done and what needs to be done. (The part of project management that I think is most effective) It is very reasonably priced, and is fully web hosted, so there is no software to install. They know that their product is addictive, so they give out the first hit for free. (one project at a time)
Check it out!
