Basecamp, Project Collaboration Utopia

Basecamp has just added their one-millionth user this week. I thought this would be a good time to introduce you to my (and perhaps a million others') favorite Web Services Application and what many believe to be the first real Web 2.0 business program.

I began my project management life like most people in college: with a glorified day planner/address book. You know the type — the kind you get at the college bookstore with places for your contacts, a calendar, notes, etc. It wasn't glorious but it did the minimum.

As my work got more complex, it became harder and harder to manage the various projects in my work life. There were too many people to manage, too many different places to be, jobs to do, and things to remember. The obvious idea was to get one of the software packages of the day and put my work life in its hands.

Microsoft Project 98 was my first attempt at getting this right. It had all the bells and whistles we had learned about in school: Gantt charts, file storage, online address books, goal tracking etc., etc. The problem? It was just a pain. I had to put more time into it than I would save in the long run. When a project started, I would set it all up in Project then I would wait until the project was over and fill in all of the blanks.

I wasn't the only person who wasn't getting out of it more than put in. My coworkers weren't using it either. We were reverting to group emails and shared calendars and such. To do lists were entered into my Outlook. Project updates were sent via email for everyone to manage. This seemed to work best and most people in my groups worked the same way even though other packages had come along.

Fast forward to 2003. I was tasked with finding a cross platform project management tool for a project team that was going to be working in New York and San Francisco simultaneously. This team was going to be on the road a bit and often times out of the office so they wanted a web based solution. The project management wasn't too complex, just a $100,000 website, a small database and some collateral material. One of my team members suggested Basecamp because she was using it on another project.

It was love at first sight. I had the free demo version running in 1 minute. It was doing things in my browser that I thought could be done only in an application (this was obviously one of the first AJAX applications on the web — and the first application on the Ruby on Rails platform).

I entered my eight-person team into the application. There were cool things like room for a picture of each person and information like their IM name along with all of the normal contact information. All of this was so easy, simple and (gasp!) fun.

Next, I entered all of the milestones for the project — there were about 10 major ones — all of which could be entered in one page with smart date drop-down menus. Wow! It keeps getting better. For each milestone, I assigned a few to dos to some team members and some groups. Again — too easy.

By the time the team members got their introductory email, I had entered in the skeleton of the whole project. One by one, each team member logged in and looked at the work they had to do. They could see what other members were doing and how their jobs affected the project. They were adding messages to the blog-like interface immediately and commenting on each others' thoughts. All of this without any instruction from me. I didn't have to explain a thing.

Basecamp, Project Collaboration Utopia

Basecamp has just added their one-millionth user this week. I thought this would be a good time to introduce you to my (and perhaps a million others') favorite Web Services Application and what many believe to be the first real Web 2.0 business program.

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