Happy project management

“You don’t have to give up the power of Microsoft Project for the simplicity and efficacy of Basecamp. The IntelliGantt Add In for Microsoft Project gives you the best of both worlds, which means a happy project manager and a happy team.”

That quote, from the Team Direction Web site, pretty much sums up my latest breakthrough as project manager for Web Communications. But how did I get there?

It began with Basecamp

Our department has been using Basecamp since before I worked here. It’s a great online tool for managing project tasks because it allows everyone on the team to see to-do lists across multiple projects and to add, delete and mark complete those to-do items as needed. You can give team members access to as little or as much as needed and there are no syncing or hosting issues since it is Web-based.

Monthly charge or not, we weren’t ready to give up our Basecamp account. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. While Basecamp allows you to assign milestones within a project, it doesn’t have the ability to apply complex dependencies among those milestones. (You know, task B can’t start until task A finishes, no matter how late task A runs, and so on…) Yes, if you move one, Basecamp can move all subsequent milestones back by the same number of days, but this is far too simplistic for the level of complexity in a multi-person, multi-project office.

Enter MS Project

Gantt charts are my friend. I’m a visual person, and I really like being able to see a project (or several projects, in my case) laid out in front of me on a timeline— no imagination required. In a perfect world, our department would switch over to Project and take advantage of its collaboration features. But the problem with that is that we’d need the more expensive MS Project Server and the Web Access add-on. What’s more, we would have to purchase 12 licenses and somehow get our IT department to expedite their process for evaluating software and providing support. Not likely.

So, I compromised and decided that we really only need one copy of MS Project Standard for our department. The least expensive solution in the Project family of products.
I ‘d make my Gantt charts and print them for my office wall from time to time so that others could check in to see how things were shaping up. And then I could take some time to transpose those dates and to-dos into Basecamp. It’s not ideal, but it’s a cost-effective compromise.

But what if Project could sync with Basecamp? That’d boost my productivity like none other, right?

Enter the IntelliGantt Add In for MS Project

The IntelliGantt Add In for MS Project seems to have been developed with MS SharePoint in mind, but it does sync with Basecamp. Here’s a screencast about integrating Project and Basecamp. I struggled a bit at first, but once I enabled Basecamp’s API, it worked like a charm. (You need to be the account owner, not just an administrator, to do this.) I’m still working out the kinks, like how to set up MS Project so that milestones and to-do items appear correctly in Basecamp, but it’s already saving me mucho time.

As it stands now, all of the line items from MS Project show up in Basecamp as one to-do list. I still need to assign responsibility for the task, but I’m guessing there’s away to automate this that I haven’t found yet. I also need to manually sort to-dos into separate lists for easier reading in Basecamp, but that’s not too time consuming with the drag and drop feature.

As with anything, the longer I use the software, the more adept I’ll become. I’m definitely open to advice if anyone else has a similar set-up, though!