Item: Basecamp
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Basecamp

Pros and Cons

Pros

Though we don't necessarily use this how it's designed, we do use it to coordinate projects across multiple departments. It allows us to have not only a shared calendar for all of our different marketing efforts, it also is a place to keep all of the collateral we need for each project in one place.
We are able to use this to share documents, images, and various checklists to keep everyone on the same page. It serves as a shared repository of different pieces of information, helping to avoid silos and getting us over having to rely on share drives and email communications.
We can manage a schedule with Basecamp that holds all of our different teams accountable to the projects that are being managed - which is great when we have so many things going on with departments who don't often communicate with each other.

Cons

There's no way to share just the calendar without also including someone on a project. So, people may receive information that doesn't pertain to them, and then it can create some question of separating the signal from the noise on important projects.
There is no versioning available for items added to Basecamp - so your options are either to replace historical documents with the new ones, or to append the new documents and try to be clear about the order of importance.
They removed the milestone functionality from calendar events, which was a nice way to manage things on the calendar and to mark them as complete. We've worked around it by creating a "Done" calendar and migrating completed calendar events to that project.

Return on Investment

We've increased efficiency of communication for various teams, who are juggling a lot of projects at once.
We've increased visibility of what projects are happening at the same time, to alleviate conversations about resourcing.
It has increased the amount of process (you can decide if that's good or bad) - which has been something we've had to reinforce internally.

For the few downsides, Basecamp has an intuitive interface, a quick ramp-up, and allows us to track projects in a really simplified way across multiple departments. It's really changed the way we juggle these various competing goals, and no other system I've used has made it so streamlined to keep everything - timelines, assets, project participants - in one place.

Likelihood to Recommend

We use this more as a repository of all feedback around different projects. This has become a key way that we communicate across different teams in different locations. This also helps us to ensure that, year over year, we have a historical context of why particular decisions were made. It's become an invaluable way to keep the clutter out of email and still keep everyone calling from the same playbook, so to speak. As teams continue to adopt this as a communication tool, we're seeing great results in how we're able to collaborate across different roles.

Comments

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It won't replace MS Project, but it will replace your share drive.