Basecamp vs. Digital.ai Agility

Basecamp is a wonderful tool for teams of varying degrees of technical knowledge, teams managing lots of different types of "agifall" and waterfall projects, and teams that are remotely distributed. It's probably less useful for more strictly agile-focused development teams, compared to other more flexible software applications like Jira and Asana.

Incentivized

Scenarios where it works well: 1) Retros can be very well facilitated & notes/action items
can be captured against the sprint. 2) Product Owner can effectively track the story
progress with all the test-cases, design etc. 3) Being good scaling support, it provides good visibility
across multiple teams, programs and agile portfolios, providing a centralized
environment where all our stakeholders can easily work together regardless of location. 4) It provides easy tracking all of your epics,
stories, themes, defects, tasks, tests and issues 5) I like its intuitive UI as for moving stories
around, burning hours. 6) It allows top leadership to visualize
and report their strategic plans, giving all stakeholders the relevant data
that they need to stay dedicated to the project priorities. 7) It can be easily integrated with slack
so for few teams we used slack for collaboration Scenarios where it did not work well: 1) Test Management need improvement in
terms of tracking tests, team had hard time tracking regression test cases. 2) Version one comes with lot of features like
Rally but here we don’t get customizations which is there in Jira where from workflow
to issue everything can be customized based on your team/program/portfolio
requirements. 3) Lot of navigation to access basic
stuff. Example I want to go to bug attachment , there are lt of clicks &
navigation need to do which should be pretty straightforward I feel.

Incentivized

• Task management - It is very easy to add, organize and discuss tasks within Basecamp's interface.
• The "Campfire" function is great for communicating when you just have a quick question for someone on the team.
• Notifications - Basecamp lets you decide how often and about what you'd like to be notified. The ability to respond to messages in Basecamp directly via email saves a lot of time.

Incentivized

• Automated saving of changes, no records can be lost because all items are saved in real-time.
• The watch function, optional but beneficial when managing multiple teams or projects.

Incentivized

• High Learning Curve. It's true that it can be easy to use, but to use well and effectively takes some time to learn. It's recommended to have an agreed-upon system in your team of what tools to use and when.
• Notification Overload. If people aren't careful they could send a notification to everyone when only a couple people were meant to be prompted. And since emails are sent by default, you could have your mailbox overloaded with unnecessary updates. This is where it takes a bit of training in your team to have an agreed-upon system.
• Lack of organization with Archived Projects. I will often need to reference an archived project to make a new one, but there is only a list of archived projects in alphabetical order, with no way to organize by archive date, or even search.

Incentivized

• Saving of changes is inconsistent. Sometimes the changes appear to save automatically and other times the user needs to click the "Apply" button. Until the user is familiar with when this needs to happen, work can easily be lost.
• This may be a setup configuration issue, but it would be good to be able to set the default team when creating stories. Too often stories are created and the user forgets to enter the team and they need to search the entire database for the story that was just created.

Incentivized

When I bring new people onto a project, it's immediately obvious how to use Basecamp. I don't have to worry about teaching them the features or walking them through it, it's just incredibly user-friendly. For this reason, I'll continue to renew my subscription even as new people are brought onto production jobs or the client changes.

Basecamp is a little tricky to learn. I've used it for quite a while but I feel like there's still so much I don't know. It took me a while to learn but having used it in college definitely helped me integrate it into my work career.

Incentivized

I've never experienced downtime while using Basecamp, or been unable to access it when I needed it. That's not to say they've never had downtime, but I've been lucky enough not to encounter any, and I work odd hours, including late nights when maintenance is often undertaken.

Incentivized

For the many reasons I've given, Basecamp is a very strong program. There are a few features I can imagine that might make it even better, but I don't have a basis for comparison to be able to say that there is definitely a better one out there. I've noticed that Basecamp has evolved a bit from the time I started using it until now, so that makes me think that the producer of this program values it and believes in continuous improvement. If you could use the features offered by Basecamp, I would think you could use it with confidence.

Incentivized

VersionOne provides outstanding training. They have Product Owner training that I recommend every Product Owner attend. They have scrum master training and other agile training that was well worth the money paid because it made the teams more productive. And the support for the tool is incredible. These people live and breathe Agile and are evangelists and enthusiasts.

Incentivized

Decide the process before implementation - i.e. when it's due 8/9 does that mean 8am, noon, 5pm, 11:59pm? Check your to-do list frequently Set-up templates - just not with the dates (they can be funky)

Pretty good, but [Basecamp] has its drawbacks. Honestly I find the interface non-intuitive and sometimes have trouble figuring out how to change the status of a task. Perhaps it has something to do with the way it was originally set up by the admin, but I'm not sure. I liked Jira's drag and drop obvious functionality, but the project management side of the software was lacking. Smartsheet has excellent project management functionality, but the task management isn't as good.

Incentivized

Basecamp functions much differently from Version One and serves a different purpose, so it's kind of like comparing apples and oranges. However, both V1 and Basecamp have their pros and cons. V1 makes it easier to manage Agile processes, but Basecamp is more user-friendly and can be used for broader purposes. At our organization, we utilize both products. V1 is what we use to manage processes internally, and Basecamp is what we use to manage client-facing processes. If our organization wasn't Agile, I would prefer to use Basecamp for all project management (internal and client-facing), and have done so at previous organizations for which I've worked

Incentivized

• It has saved me time when having to get the same message out to multiple restaurants
• It has helped us make smarter operational decisions because we can all collaborate on an answer in a shorter amount of time (instead of calling a meeting!!!)
• The calendar function allows us to plot out our marketing agenda for the month and add/change it together as needed. The chef will post his recipe, the managers will cost it out, the social media manager will post pictures on it, and ultimately we will get that information out on an info sheet to the staff by printing the page.

Incentivized

• I came in near the end of our use of VersionOne (we are migrating to Jira), and I don't operate or think at the business return (ROI) level. I'm not the one to comment on this!
• I suspect that V1 added much clarity to the prioritization of work, and added visibility across entire teams. So I assume that it had a positive impact on returns.

Incentivized