For a variety of reasons, DMN Communications is decentralized. Aaron and I work out of our home offices or at client sites. Often, each of us works on a different project. But there are times when we need to collaborate. This was recently the case when we worked on a brochure for a small telecommunications software company.

Because Aaron and I live in different parts of Toronto and work fairly long hours, it’s difficult for us to meet as regularly as we’d like to — even socially. And coordinating a project under these circumstances can be difficult. To ease this difficulty, Aaron and I spent some time investigating several project management applications.

The problem is that none of the project management software we looked at met our needs — it was generally too bulky and complex, or expensive. Our other option was to update and email a spreadsheet and set of word processor files. Having done that in that pase, we knew it had the potential to cause the nightmares of maintaining multiple copies of the files and losing them.

In the end, we decided on using Basecamp, an online project management and collaboration tool. It was a good move. Basecamp enabled us to effectively divide the work between us and keep on track with our milestones and deadlines. Here’s how we did it.

In Backpack, we created an area specifically for the brochure project. We then defined a few to-do items — mainly stating who was to tackle which part of the project, and the research that we needed to do.

Then, we created a number of milestones. These are simply deadlines by which we needed to get things, like an outline and a first draft, done. The great thing about Basecamp is that you can configure it to send emails that let you know when a milestone is approaching. As the project progressed, we added new milestones — such as deadlines for incorporating the client’s suggestions and edits into the copy.

Instead of exchanging word processor files, we did the basic writing in our Basecamp’s Writeboard. The Writeboard is a simple text entry system, sort of like a wiki. While you can’t do much formatting in a Writeboard, it does save previous versions of a document. This enables you to not only track your changes, but also roll back to previous versions if necessary. On top of that, we can add comments to the Writeboard.

Once we were satisfied with a draft, we just copied it into a word processor file and emailed that to the client.

We kept in touch during the project by leaving messages in our Basecampe, via instant messenger, and by doing regular GoogleTalk voice chats.

Overall, the project went smoothly and the client was happy. I don’t think we would have been as organized if we hadn’t used Basecamp.

Related posts:

1. Backing up a project in Basecamp
2. Online project management
3. Managing projects and collaborating online