3 Ways to Increase Your Productivity Using Basecamp
In an office of 70 people and at least 100 projects every year, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and disorganized as a project manager, and sometimes, even an employee. At the Digital Corps, students from Ball State University work on projects for real-world clients using design thinking and emerging technologies. They gain industry experience while developing portfolio pieces to help them with meet their goals and dreams for the future. As the Digital Corps grew to employ more than 70 students, it became clear that a new project management system was needed to increase productivity and reduce scope creep.
First, the Corps created a new role: The Junior Project Manager. These students undergo specific training to prepare them to work as a project manager. They’re responsible for developing project timelines and ensuring that their team is on track. It is essential for a JPM to understand the video production process or a design project timeline so that their project management aligns with the employee workflows.
Next, a new workflow system full of approvals and checks was implementedto ensure that the best products were being handed off to the client. Projects move up the growing rank of students and ultimately to a professional staff member, who provides final approval.
Finally, a new tool was introduced to facilitate all of these new workflows and team members. The Digital Corps adopted Basecamp to help Corps students increase productivity and even the number of projects that were completed every semester. Here’s how they did it.
Assign tasks and set deadlines for specific people and tasks
Basecamp offers you the ability to assign tasks to specific people. By creating these assignments, there is a central location for students to refer to. Thanks to this feature, team members rarely forget what they’re supposed to be doing. Additionally, there is a location in basecamp where users can view every single task they’re assigned to. This allows employees to prioritize certain tasks over others based on their availability and the coworkers in the office at the time. After being assigned a task, Basecamp will remind that person in their weekly email update on Monday with a list of uncompleted, upcoming and overdue tasks.
For a project manager, this feature is priceless. Assigning people tasks, and allowing the program to automatically remind them has lead to substantially less confusion and increased project awareness.
It’s important to note that this does not eliminate the role of a project manager. Having a person (or a team of people) provide insight and proper evaluation is still necessary to expediting workflows..
Organize Basecamp with Templates
Basecamp can actually be organized in many different ways. This process can be left up to the project manager or even employees on the project. We found that by streamlining the organization of a Basecamp task list, it is easier and more efficient for students to work on projects.
Every project is different, but all have some similar milestones. For many projects, the initial kick-off and final evaluation are all present in the timeline. Basecamp can generate project templates that will automatically populate a list with tasks that have been set based on past projects. This reduces the amount of time the project manager spends adding these tasks one-by-one.
For instance, if you know that every project your team works on has a review or evaluation process, add this process to your template so that the project manager doesn’t have to later. It streamlines the structure of the project making it more efficient for everyone on the team.
Utilize comments and file uploads to be as informative as possible
While you may utilize other file management systems, like Dropbox, using the Basecamp file upload and comment section helps organize the workflow.
If the majority of your documents are on the cloud, we recommend sharing the link to the file of that completed task in the Basecamp list item. A comment will trigger a notification for the project manager who can either review the content and make further comments, or they can approve the assets immediately. This eliminates the process for searching for documents
Basecamp has been a great tool for the Digital Corps to enhance the workflows and project formats. It allowed us to easily adapt to new strategies and reinforce project guidelines. It’s important to understand that this does not completely replace your day-to-day tasks as a project manager or employee. Instead, using Basecamp (or any other tool) as supplemental to the way you work is the best option.
