Thanks, Megan. Yours and Greg’s vote of confidence in Basecamp was very useful. I’ve signed up for a free 30-day trial and like what I’ve played with in the back-end so far. Waiting to see how the rest of the staff likes using it.
What project management software / techniques do you use to coordinate digital projects that cross departments and/or publications?
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Projects such as designing and/or redesigning a news website, adding a third-party product (Legacy, Boocoo, Local.com), installing a new front-end system, etc., involve people from the newsroom, the ad department, the production department, accounting, executive management, etc. And, if your company owns more than one publication, you can continually add more “stakeholders” to a project. (Oh, how I cringed when the folks I covered as a reporter used that word — and yet there it is!)
Short of CC’ing everyone on emails and holding dozens of meetings, has anyone found a good solution for coordinating such projects and keeping everyone in the loop?
I’ve been looking at project management software at 37signals
Any other software suggestions? Or good tricks learned through trial and error?
amyjobrown
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3 Answers
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At CIM we use Rally (rallydev.com) and generally follow Scrum as our project framework.
I've used Basecamp outside of CIM for a few projects and found it a great tool.
I know this is going to sound strange, but I believe the project framework is more important than the software to support it. Scrum is vastly more important than Rally in my opinion.
For example, many sprints (development-release cycles) we are effectively organized with nothing more than whiteboards and stickies.
By identifying user stories, identifying key project roles like business owner, scrum master, designer, editor, qa engineer, etc, bringing them together daily for the stand-up meeting, and working towards short, deliverable releases, it facilitates a good outcome.
It is a lightweight process, but not in terms of discipline required to make it happen. So getting this established in any project can be a challenge, but it is worth it.
Previously I worked at Philly.com for KRD and I can see how this methodology could have worked there. It feels 'Internet-native' and recognizes that requirements are changing and can change during the course of project simply due to the fact that when you finally see some output, you may decide you want something different. Agile empowers that.
karl
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Basecamp from 37signals is pretty good -- I've used it for a number of projects in the past. It's easy to use and you can add more people to a project at any time.
A free, self-hosted alternative is Project Pier.
Greg Linch
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+1 for basecamp, but I've also used a lot of other similar project management sites (free or opensource). My current favorite is Producteev for Gmail and Google Calendar integration.
Megan Taylor
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Thanks for the feedback, Greg.