How I Manage Projects

Managing projects is hard. I’ve come to learn this over the last year. [poor] Project management is also without a doubt one of the factors why Hippstr has been delayed for almost a year now. So I’m going to share with you a few of the tools, services and practices that have helped improve my productivity and my team’s.

Those who are around me often will know I never shut up about how great basecamp is. And it really is.

“Basecamp is the smarter, easier, more elegant way to collaborate on your internal and client projects.”
37signals

Basecamp is a really simple and easy-to-use project management system. With great to-do management, a forum like “messages” section and milestones (There’s more but this is the important sutff). To-dos are with out a doubt the most useful aspect of Basecamp. They allow me to assign a task to any individual. When this task is complete it can be checked off. This will show up in the project summary page also (pictured below).

I use messages mostly for brainstorming. Where I post an idea which is blasted out to all my team via email (They can reply to the message by replying to the email). Why is this useful? When you’re working with a global team or even a local one, that are not all around at the same time, this is an indisposable tool. Reducing the amount of required meetings (which are a pain to schedule across timezones) and including all the team without the use of a messy mailing list solution.

“Basecamp is the iPod of project collaboration.”
Joshua Peterson, CEO, 43things

Both messages and to-dos can all be associated with a particular milestone. For example at the moment all hippstr to-do’s are associated with the private beta 1 milestone. Meaning we’re all working towards a set target, which is important.

In summary basecamp allows all the team to stay in touch, keep up to date with everything that’s happening and track progress (which is key and a moral booster on those bad days). I’ve used it with just myself to teams of 20 and it has always been a success. Basecamp can be described in one word, “phenomenal”. Sign up for free today at http://basecamphq.com.

Subversion. Subversion (aka. svn) is a version control system. In english, subversion keeps track of all the changes made to a code base (It can be used with anything though, word files, pictures, text files, etc. I just happen to use it for code). Allowing us to revert to a previous version when we break something, instead of wasting hours trying to find that thing we changed which broke everything.

Subversion also doubles up as a backup solution as it’s hosted on a remote server. Meaning if my house burns down all my work isn’t lost (although I think I have bigger problems if my house burns down). Subversion’s usefulness is greatly increased when working in teams as it manages conflicts. If two people change the same file, instead of one set of changes being lost, subversion presents you with a choice to merge the changes or choose which you would like to keep.

Previously I would’ve recommended trac in conjunction with subversion, but really it’s completely useless and difficult to use. I’m yet to find a bug tracking + svn interface system I like. Nevertheless subversion is an indispensable tool, get started today at http://subversion.tigris.org/. Soon there will be an article on how to configure subversion.

Coming up in part 2. I will talk about campfire, getting real, practices and what I don’t use.