Cyber-Duck is a digital agency based in London, specialising in user-experience, software as a service projects, and online marketing. Below, Cyber-Duck's Jerome Botbol explains how the team there uses Basecamp.
We started using Basecamp fully in early 2010 after a short trial period as we were finding that project management was happening in a lot of different places. It made so much sense to centralise this and find a way for everyone to be connected to the projects they needed to be involved in.
We used to find that particularly on large projects, communication through e-mail can leave key people out of the loop when they are not carbon copied. Every large project we take on is now set up on Basecamp before we do anything else. All communication happens through the messaging tool so all project stakeholders are kept up to date with elements of the project affecting them.
Copywriting, images, PDFs and other assets are all uploaded using either Writeboards or through the file upload functionality. This is a brilliant and perhaps underrated feature of Basecamp as it allows all parties to easily see the latest version of client-facing files.
To-Dos are commonly used internally to manage the tasks of each member of our staff. Everyone has their own way of using it, some adding their own tasks and others using it as a primary point of finding out about new tasks before they are fully briefed on them.
Basecamp was a lifesaver when it came to one project in particular. The website production featured a large amount of wildlife photography, all of which needed to be matched up to content. It was impractical for the client to send over physical copies of the files on a disk or hard drive as they are based in Uganda; Basecamp circumvented this problem with file upload and Writeboards functionality. Having these features present in combination with project milestones, messages and To-Dos meant the entire project could be managed from one place.
One method we find of increasing our Basecamp productivity is including levels of priority on our To-Do lists; 1st, 2nd and 3rd. This allows us to ensure items which need to be finished really soon (but don’t have a specific deadline) are completed before tasks that could easily wait a while longer.
The great thing about Basecamp is that its simplicity lends itself incredibly well to giving everyone the ability to create their own way of using it. All members of the Cyber-Duck team have their own tweaks, making it work for them. That’s what makes it unique – simplicity.
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