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Can anyone recommend a way to monitor project status in Basecamp (New Basecamp)?

I have a list of 25 projects, and I'd love to be able to label them action needed, on hold, waiting for client. I spoke to support and the only way they know of is to change the titles of the projects to reflect these statuses, but I don't like that because my clients are in on the projects and I don't want to create confusion by changing project names.

pnuts
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David
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3 Answers3

1

The Roadmap product, which integrates with Basecamp, lets you define custom health labels (along with a color). Within Roadmap, you can then assign these to your Basecamp projects and track/report using them. More info here.

I don't know of any formal way to do this within Basecamp all by itself - I think you need a complementary tool. In full disclosure, I work for Roadmap. I should also mention that the Custom Health feature applies to Roadmap's Plus and Pro plans.

Dave Clausen
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We've started using internal user accounts as psuedo-statuses. So we've created

backlog, ready to test, ready to push

That way, we can keep the tasks organized in their original to-do lists, even if backlogged (assigned to the 'backlog' user). If you have one person tasked to QA or Pushes, you're probably OK. With a smaller shop like ours, I just go in and filter tasks for 'ready to test' in the morning for what I need to check.

Bonus: you can see tasks 'ready to test' or 'ready to push' across ALL projects in basecamp when viewing the pseudo-status user's profile.

Eric G
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Here's an idea:

Create a project called "Projects" that is not client visible.

Add 1 To Do list per project Status, for example:

  • Action Required
  • On Hold
  • Waiting for Client

Drag and drop the To Do Lists into the order you like.

Then, add a To Do Item for each project - place it on the To Do list that represents it's current status.

As the project moves from one status to another, simply drag and drop it to the list the matches it's current status.

What you have now is a 1-page view of all your projects and what status they are currently in, with drag-drop mechanism for easily moving projects from one status to another.

Some additional benefits/tricks:

  1. Put the link for each project in the name of the To Do Item for that project - so you can quickly navigate to the project when viewing the status of all projects. (If Basecamp New supports markdown here, you could even use that syntax to make the project name be the text for the link)
  2. You can arrange your projects into priority order within their respective categories in order to give the visual of what should be worked on first within that category.
  3. If you are doing Scrum sprints, you can make the top To Do List be named after the release (e.g. "ProjectX Release 11.2" such that when all stories for that release have arrived at the top, you can push to production.
  4. Checking off the To Do items, moves them to the bottom - so you can have the done tasks separated from the ones still in progress.
  5. Checking off all To Do Items in a To Do List moves the list to the right side of the page, so that when the top To Do list is named after a release, and all items are checked off, the "release" moves aside to the right, and you can create the next sprint or release as the top To Do List - and watch your deployed releases gather up on the side.
qxotk
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