Advantages and Disadvantages of Basecamp
Basecamp is a web-based project management software. It can facilitate communication among all members involved in the project and help everyone work more efficiently, but of course, nothing is perfect, and Basecamp also has its shortcomings. This blog will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of Basecamp from the point of view of a small-sized translation company.
With Basecamp, it’s easy to get relevant people involved.
After creating a project on Basecamp, a project manager can invite up to 50 people, including translators, editors, engineers and even clients, to the group. This is enough for a small-sized company to manage their projects. Everyone can add events in the project calendar. People can also choose whether or not to let others see the events in the calendar. For example, if the project manager does not want the client to see the schedule, he or she can just exclude the clients when creating events. If involved, people will see the event on their own calendar. With this function, people clearly know the project plan and events related to them.
It helps members to email and discuss easily.
On the discussion page, everyone can write messages, which facilitates discussion among the group members. Besides, massager can choose whether to send emails to remind other members of the message and whom the message is sent to without signing in the mailbox. This makes emailing an easy thing, saving everyone’s time and energy.
It helps project managers to organize everything.
In a small-sized translation company, there may be only one or two project managers, but it is possible that each manager needs to manage more than one project at one time. With Basecamp project managers can send easily email to members in the project, so they can learn the progress and adjust the plan accordingly. Even better, Basecamp helps project managers easily manage several programs at one time. On the calendar, events of different projects will be shown in different color. In this way, everything can be managed in an orderly way.
But……
It is not free.
The minimum monthly fee is 20$. With this monthly package, the company can get 3GB storage space and run 10 projects on Basecamp. 20$ per month is not a large amount, but for some one-person company which only runs one project at a time, 20$ per month will be too much.
People cannot upload folders.
One feature of Basecamp is that group members can add files in the message and let others see them. However, folders cannot be added. This is inconvenient, as in a translation project, there are always many files and it is better to send some files, like translated text and the list of terms, to other people at the same time, or it is easy to confuse one with another.
Messages cannot be classified.
Another shortcoming of Basecamp is that it cannot help classify messages. It is true that in a small-sized company, there may not be many people sending messages on the project management webpage. However, it is possible that many discussions take place even in a small project. As messages add up, it is better to classify them so that people can find previous messages easily. However, Basecamp does not have this function.
Generally speaking, compared with the benefits of Basecamp, its shortcomings are not so noticeable, but for small-sized translation companies with limited resources, they should weigh their needs and the benefits Basecamp can bring before deciding to use it.