Having used both Basecamp and Assembla as project management tools for over a year now, I’m come to see pros and cons in each system. Basecamp is the one I prefer for my freelance projects; Assembla is used by the University web team as a ticketing system. I think on balance these are suitable tools for the job in both settings: Basecamp is very user-friendly and even my least techy clients take to using it over email, while Assembla has more functionality, and offers the granularity a bigger team needs, perhaps at the expense of some usability.
Right now I want to focus on one particular element: the to-do, or task, list.
Basecamp: plenty to do...
Assembla ticketing.
Ever since Basecamp introduced the ability to comment on to-do items, I’ve found that a lot of the action in terms of managing and assigning tasks (with the attendant queries and clarifications) tends to happen in the to-do lists. But there’s one particular area of functionality that I’d like to see Basecamp include: the variable to-do status.
Let’s say you are assigned a to-do item by a client: ‘My blog posts aren’t going live on schedule’ for instance. Let’s say there’s a protracted to-and-fro pinpointing exactly what is to be fixed and why it broke in the first place. Useful information is very often added to discussions on to-dos, which is why when you check them off, Basecamp doesn’t delete them – there’s a ‘Done’ list for you to refer back to later.
But let’s say the problem isn’t a pressing one, or the justification for assigning the to-do in the first place (i.e. the demand for scheduling) is no longer relevant. In this case, I don’t want to mark the point as ‘Done’, because I didn’t fix anything, and I don’t want to delete it, because I’d lose all that useful discussion info associated with it. I need what Assembla offers: the ability to close as invalid.
Ticket status in Assembla.
This way, if we ever try to schedule blog posting again, we can refer back to the task and the related discussion, and investigate.
Perhaps a spot of colour-coding is what’s required to bring some of Assembla’s versatile ticketing technology to the Basecamp to-do list?
