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How Basecamp Can Salvage Your Work (Or, How Basecamp Can Keep You from Going Berserk)

We’ve all been there – an important project is due soon, and you just can’t seem to find the email between you and your partner, a prospective buyer, or your development team. Part of your team is working with one set of assumptions, while the other half has completely different assumptions. You’ve got to figure out the requirements, and the deadline is right around the corner.

Using a project management tool like Basecamp does one big thing to help solve this – it pulls you out of email.

Email is a poor tool for team communication because it’s one-to-one, and it’s hard to keep all involved parties updated on the current status of a project and on the same page.

A project management application allows all of your communication to move to a central repository. Instead of one-to-one communication, you get many-to-many communication, creating more transparency for the business and making it much easier to keep everyone aligned.

Getting everyone to buy into a project management tool can be tricky. If one person won’t use the system, then it effectively breaks for everyone. No longer will the team benefit from a searchable hub with all of the knowledge, information, communication, and relevant documentation on your current projects.

This is especially true if a key lead team member doesn’t buy into the new system. This causes the team to keep two sets of info: one on the project management system, and one for the non-participating user. Often, these multiple sets of info conflict with each other.

Recognizing this problem is one of the key reasons we built Zapier. Team members like to pick the apps that work for them. Basecamp may be great for managing non-technical projects. But the developers on the team will be more efficient using a tool like GitHub. With Zapier, team members can choose to consume information in the format they like with integrations.

Project leads can set to-dos and milestones in Basecamp and have them sync to GitHub to create issues and milestones for the development team to follow along with. Everyone can get the benefits of using a project management system, while also getting to choose the tool best suited for the work they do – rather than be forced into an all-in-one system or a system chosen by a boss not accustomed to actually working within the system.

Basecamp, or any proper project management system, can be a great tool for teams trying to overcome communication and information access issues. By working with your team and a project management tool, you can come up with workflows for your team, and create a more efficient and productive company. The team that works together stays together.

Wade Foster is the co-founder of Zapier.com. Zapier is a simple way to push data between two web applications. Zapier gives you the opportunity to build unique integrations between your favorite web applications, without ever having to write a single line of code.

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