In this interview we speak to Gez Daring, Business Development
Director of KMP Digitata;
1. How long have you been a Basecamp user and what made you
choose Basecamp as your time management tool?
We've been using Basecamp for over 3 years. We use it to track
time across the organisation and for client work. We're a digital
agency so tracking project time is very important to us as it
allows us to see if we've been profitable on a project and to what
extent. We chose Basecamp after spending quite a lot of time
looking at options because it fitted our needs quite well.
Specifically, the ability to give clients access to projects and
then to collaborate on them was very useful, as well as the ability
to track time on individual tasks and the project as a whole.
2. What were the key features that bcToolkit supplied you with
that Basecamp alone couldn't?
Basecamp can understand time spent on a project but it cannot
understand a budget or estimate for that time. Without this I would
have to manually work out where a project's expenditure lies at any
one time meaning a lot of wasted hours. bcToolkit fills this gap
perfectly because it allows me to place estimates / budget (using
square brackets / parentheses) onto each task in a project and then
constantly assess where each task is up to. I can also generate
complete project reports and staffing reports so I can work out
productivity for every member of staff. This functionality is
extremely important to us and I would now find it hard to operate
without it.
Another piece of key functionality is categorising certain
projects across our organisation. For example I have categorised
some projects as "sales" or "marketing". One of the reports in
bcToolkit allows me to see how much time we are spending internally
on those areas, so now at Board meetings I can pull out figures and
run comparisons of how much time (and money) we are spending on
marketing vs sales etc.
3. Approximately, how many projects do you use bcToolkit
for?
We have just over 100 projects currently open in Basecamp. I use
bcToolkit to track all of them. Most import to me are the client
projects, of which we have about 9 key projects which I track on a
daily basis.
4. By using bcToolkit have you seen an improvement in your
organisation's productivity?
Since using bcToolkit our productivity has increased by 12%.
This is because I can see at a moment's notice which projects are
under their budget and which projects have exceeded their budget;
this allows me to take corrective action much sooner than if I was
trying to manually work out figures from Basecamp's in-built time
tool.
5. Do you use the "Time by Category" feature? If so what
categories in your organisation do you track outside of "Project",
"Client" and "User"?
We do use that tool within bcToolkit and currently track the
following categories: Research and Development, Sales, Marketing,
Operations, Projects and Investment. This enables me to report back
to board level on how the time within our organisation is spread
across these departments, which is invaluable to any business.
6. Can you provide us with an example of where bcToolkit helped
you identify an inefficient project?
A few months ago we were working on a major client project that
we had placed various members of staff onto to ensure we hit the
deadline for deployment. Our main concern was hitting this deadline
- however it wasn't until I fed the budget for the project into
bcToolkit that I saw we'd actually exceeded our budget by 60% !
This enabled us to make some critical time saving decisions which
meant that the project didn't spiral completely out of control.
7. Has bcToolkit helped you with your Human Resource Management
by being able to assess your employees' time efficiencies?
Yes, one of the reports on bcToolkit allows me to see at a
glance exactly what tasks all of my team are working on at any one
time. I can drill down into their task list and see how complete
each task is (as bcToolkit works it out from the time they have
entered vs the budget). For those members of staff that are taking
too long to complete a task, I can then take corrective action.
8. What features would you like to see in bcToolkit in the
future?
I'd like to see a report which shows the state of all of our
projects at a glance as currently I have to use a drop down menu to
select each project individually.
We would like to thank Gez for taking some time out to speak with
us. We always appreciate feedback from our users so if there is a
feature that you would like to see added to bcToolkit then please
feel free to get in touch by emailing us at info@bctoolkit.com
See Plans & Pricing