Behind-the-Scenes: How we use Basecamp

Our Active Projects

As you know, the WooTeam is located all across the world; so managing all of our activities effectively, and making sure that we’re all on (approximately) the same page at all times, is quite a challenge. To help us lighten the management-load a bit, we – just like most other web-savvy geeks – use Basecamp to track our daily activities & tasks on one, easy-to-access platform.

So we wanted to give you a bit of an overview of how we use Basecamp for internal management, as well as interacting with all of our outside collaborators. At any given time, we’re interacting with 10 – 20 different people, on different areas of our business, with different WooTeam members in charge of managing the respective processes. It is thus quite challenging at times, but I’d like to think that we have a solid system in place, which has allowed us to keep most of the important things on the radar.

Here’s how we do it…

Less E-mail; Permanent Storage

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of our Basecamp-usage, I need to explain why we use the platform… For obvious reasons, we’re trying to eliminate unnecessary e-mails (those where everyone needs to be CC’ed) between team members; so with Basecamp the information is accessible to everyone that might need to see it, but only the people that need the info to act upon it, get notified. The whole team thus knows what’s going on (with Basecamp acting as a status report of kinds) and they have the option of checking in on this any time they want or need to (not when they’re e-mailed unnecessarily).

The second main reason for using Basecamp (over e-mail), is the fact that all of our most important data, decisions & discussions are kept in one, central place. This is important, considering our geographical differences, as well as helping us when we’re not at our normal workplace (i.e. traveling). We’ve also found that this is great for accountability & efficiency in making sure that all to-do’s are handled in due time & as planned.

Milestones & To-do’s

We aren’t extremely “strict” when it comes to committing to deadlines or living by a rigid to-do list. But in recent weeks, we’ve tried to include some of the most important stuff as milestones. Have a look…

Milestones

With this approach to To-do’s & Milestones, I think we’re giving the whole team quite an overview of what’s happening in the future. So the to-do’s aren’t as much a medium to make sure all of the work gets done, but rather puts the work we’re doing at the moment in context (since the to-do’s relate to future milestones). To explain: when you’re doing WordPress development day-in, day-out, it becomes difficult to see the holistic view of all the activities, but with proper milestones, we are constantly reminded of upcoming stuff.

Collaborations

Another extremely important feature of our business, is the fact that we absolutely love to collaborate with cool people outside of our own team. This has lead to us working with some of the best web designers around at the moment and recently also enabled us to translate all of our themes into 15+ languages.

In recent weeks though, we’ve found an even more valuable use for Basecamp collaborations with our beta testers, who has helped us iron out bugs in our themes, prior to release.

The Beta Free-for-All

The first thing we do via Basecamp, is to give our beta testers access to upcoming themes and then we facilitate the conversation surrounding possible bugs & tweaks on there. We have however also opened it up to posting theme concepts (i.e. ideas or designs only) on there for feedback, whilst any of the beta testers can start a new topic on anything. The great thing about this interaction is that it’s not being limited or organized; so we’re allowed access to some awesome ideas that are generated by our beta testers (who are some of the coolest WooThemes users around).

Conclusion

As I’m sure you can see, Basecamp is an integral part of the way we operate and whilst I wouldn’t go as far as saying that we’d be lost without it; we’d definitely not be able to run as smoothly as we do without it.