Working on a New Project

As I mentioned on Sunday, I’ve started a new project where I’ll help with the installation of new software. I won’t be installing the software, but I will be assisting with the migration efforts to make sure we get all the data in and set up the system properly. Over the next three months we will be migrating some sites over to the new software and debugging any issues that come up. Last week was my first week so I was in learning mode: the lingo, the way the industry works, what has been done, what needs to be done, and so on. There is a project management tool called Basecamp which I think is designed for small scale projects such as web design (although such projects could be large, too). From what I could see, I don’t think Basecamp would really help you manage the scheduling – not like Microsoft Project. For large IT type projects, you would need Microsoft Project to handle the scheduling of tasks and to delineate the dependencies. To me, Basecamp feels like a cross between Evernote  and SharePoint . You can set up a master “T0 do List” which can be re-used again and again for different projects. You also can assign a task to a person and set a due date, and such task will then show up in a calendar. Everyone can see the tasks and who has responsibility. Everyone also can check off a task when they have finished the task. There are three drawbacks with Basecamp: 1) For visual folks like me, it is hard to see the tasks on the calendar – it’s too cluttered; 2) the administration of Basecamp seems rather burdensome; and 3) too many emails go out (for each task created, for each task marked done, each comment, each file uploaded, and so on). It could be that I may not have set up Basecamp properly. Tomorrow I’ll take a look to see what I can do to make things easier.