Over the past 2 weeks we’ve been drip feed information about the new version of Basecamp. Now, thanks to some videos from 37Signals we are able to have a look at what the new version of Basecamp will look like. Here is a short video of the new UI;

We particularly love the use of page overlays that will allow us to quickly switch between To-Dos, lists and projects easily. We also feel that the new design makes everything clear and easy to understand.

We’ve also been able to have a quick look at the new Calender, which has some really nice features like the ability to drag and drop calender entries;

We are looking forward to the launch of the new Basecamp in “Early 2012″ and will stay up-to-date on any more information that is released

Companies are no different and will, from time to time, experience an increase of workload that needs to be expertly managed to avoid standards slipping or clients receiving work late. Thanks to Basecamp and bcToolkit there are tools available to set completion dates for tasks and track progress.

Milestones & “Time by Project” Progress Reporting

The Milestone feature in Basecamp allows users to set completion dates for tasks and when this is combined with bcToolkits ‘Time by Project‘ reporting, Project Managers have an the ability to react before bottlenecks happen.

The “Time by Project” reports are one of the simplest, and most useful in the suite. It is used to calculate the work effort required to complete a project, and then track the progress as the project continues. The progress of a project is represented as a percentage in the reports, with 100% indicating that the assigned time has been used and, if your time estimates were correct, the project is complete. If the progress/completion percentage is low and the Milestone set up in Basecamp is approaching then this allows the Project Manager to identify a potential problem and react accordingly. If this progress reports are left then you run the risk of a bottleneck occurring.

You can view the “Time by Project” report for a free with our 1 month trail of bcToolkit, sign up now.

You must be prepared to change your plans in a flexible and responsive way. It is unlikely that your original plan will be the one you follow all the way, since circumstances and requirements generally change as the project unfolds.

This means that you will have to re-evaluate the plan regularly and adapt it accordingly. If your project is to succeed, you must be able to anticipate and recognize the need for change, implement it, and measure its impact effectively.

It is all good and well saying this but keeping on top of project management can be hard especially if you’re trying to manage a large number of individuals. This is where bcToolkit for Basecamp can prove to be a valuable tool for project managers. Thanks to its “Time by Project” reporting tool, bcToolkit can provide users with insight into how a project is progressing and where time is being spent on it.

The progress reporting in “Time by Project” can identify which aspects/to-dos of the project are coming close to their budgeted time and allow the project manager time to re-evaluate the plan in order to accommodate any extra time required to complete the project. This could involve time from a to-do that is coming in under time being transfer over or going back to the client and sell more time.

This month we are focusing on the “Time by User” feature and how it can provide an insight into each of your employees and how their time is being managed, where they are coming in under time and where they are going over.

The first screen you are met with when you run a “Time by User” report on an individual is an overview of all the clients/projects they have to-dos in Basecamp for and this provides you with a high end overview of the individual’s work distribution. You are able to view the total amount of time the individual has logged against each client/project, what that time cost and the progress percentage. As with all bcToolkit reports the progress percentage represents the amount of time logged against a project/client compared to the actual time sold or assigned to it. This high end view allows managers to see which on projects the individual has exceeded the allocated budget.

You are then able to drill down further into the “Time by User” reports to see an employees to-do list. In the example below, the individual we are looking at has various to-do lists for different aspects of a project, such as Project Management and Support and Maintenance. This drill down provides us with a greater understanding of where time has been logged and which parts of a project are consuming the most amount of time.

The “Time by User” report can be drilled down to show every to-do in the list to show the users’ progress on each to-do task.

The “Time by User” report provides you with a powerful tool to discover how each of your employees is managing their time and the ability to identify where individuals are spending too much or too little time.

By building a new website we were able to improve a few aspects of the site that we felt couldn’t be updated effectively with the previous site. The main objectives for this new website is to streamline the sign up process and improve the layout of the information so that the more important information was emphasised to the user.

Streamlining the sign up process involved two major changes, the first of which was the design and representation of information regarding the different packages we offer. The second was a new feature called “Not sure which plan you need?”, which can identify which Basecamp package they have and so suggest the bcToolkit plan that would be best suited to that user.

We’ve made significant changes to how we present information to users by reviewing what managers and directors would be looking for in a Basecamp Time Reporting Tool and emphasising that information throughout the website.

The new website brings more than just new aesthetics and has been built to improve the site’s performance in browsers, making it quicker and more stable.

If you have any suggestions on where we can further improve the bcToolkit website then please get in touch. Otherwise we would like to hear you thoughts on the new site in the comments below.

bcToolkit’s “Time by Client” report for Basecamp provides a business with the ability to assign billed time to their clients and monitor the progress of a job or project over a user defined time period. This feature allows bcToolkit users to identify opportunities to charge clients for work that might require more time than originally billed and generally monitor their project planning.

The “Time by Client” Basecamp report consists of 5 columns:

• Estimate
  This column displays the amount of time (in hours) that has been sold for each client. It is the whole time assigned to a client and can include multiple projects.
• Sales
  This column is the amount of time billed to a client multiplied by the hourly rate the bcToolkit user has set. This provides the user with the amount of sales revenue attributed to that project/client
• Actual
  The actual column displays the amount of time employees have put against their to-dos assigned to each client.
• Cost
  Like the Sales column this multiplies the time spent in the Actual column by the hourly rate to display the cost of the time spent on each client.
• Progress
  This column is important. By providing a quick way to see which clients are coming in under or over time in the date range the user has defined. As time is entered against to-dos by employees, the progress percentage increases. If a client’s progress is less than 100% then the time billed is more than the time spent, meaning that project is profitable. Equally important is if the progress goes over 100% which means that the project has either been undersold or the project is running into difficulties. Either way, you are now losing money on this project.

The “Time by Client” Basecamp reporting tool is great for any company that wants to accurately bill clients. It can provide analysis for sales teams as to where they can reduce prices or improve time estimates to save money. It also provides project managers with an insight into which clients might be a drain on employee resources.

bcToolkit also allows the user to drill down into each client’s information to see which projects belonging to them that are causing any time issues.

The first layer is a total time recorded by each team member that can be viewed in either weekly or daily increments.

As a high level report, this provides a quick and easy way to see how much time your team members are logging against jobs. This is useful from a performance point of view but won’t help much in billing clients or really seeing where time is being spent across your business and how efficiently you are utilising the time you have. This is where bcToolkit really comes into its own.
By double clicking on any time entry, you will be presented with breakdown box for that time period. The handy user interface displays the names of all the projects that team member has worked on that day or week and the amount of time spent against each.

This view is probably the most useful when producing accurate invoicing for your clients as you can instantly see how much time has been spent. This coupled with the Time By Client and Time By Project reports forms a very useful solution for project and office managers and allows you to see not just raw data but useful information.

For those of you needing even more specific data, you can drill down from the project-level data into To-Do list level data, to give you accurate information on which area of a project or job that individual has been spending time on.

Finally, you can even drill down to the actual to-do item the time has been entered against, giving you complete clarity on all tasks and time entries. This easy-to-use interface provides quick and easy access to whichever level of data suits the needs of your business.

Basecamp from 37signals is a good place to start for an online project management or online collaboration tool. And if you want a Basecamp Reporting Tool then look no further than bcToolkit to unlock business-changing information from your Basecamp data.

The ‘Time by Category‘ tool is designed to distinguish billable/chargeable tasks from non-billable tasks, and allow you to instantly understand what percentage of your companies total working time is actually billed to clients. Furthermore, with the option to create your own categories, you can create descriptive entries such as ‘Research and Development’, ‘Investment’, ‘Retainer’, ‘Marketing’ and so forth. By closely monitoring where your company is spending its time, you can better understand how to bill your clients.

The reports generated by the ‘Time by Category’ tool display 4 measurements to provide you with an accurate picture of how well multiple projects, under the same category, are performing. Taking the example categories of ‘Investment’, ‘Project’ and ‘Retainer’ we can have a look at how each category is performing across the whole company to have an idea of where budgets are accurate and more importantly where time is going over budget.

As with other bcToolkit reports you are able to see estimated time, sales, actual time, cost and progress. The ‘Time by Category’ reports combine all of the individual figures to provide you with a global indication of how the total time of a company is being divided between the different categories defined.

The reports generate a visual representation of how efficiently the time is being managed by comparing time sold (Cost) against actual time spent (Actual), to help display whether the time sold (or budget for that project) is an accurate representation of how much time the project actually required to complete. A report indicating that budgets were accurately sold would display identical pie charts for ‘Actual’ and ‘Cost’, for example.

From the above results we can see, as a whole, the company has budgeted well for projects and tasks that belong to the categories ‘Investment’ and ‘Projects’. The report shows that the company in question has a progress point of 114.97% for the ‘Retainer’ category, meaning that they have either underestimated how long it would take to complete ‘Retainer’ tasks or undersold the cost of time to perform these tasks, this is also common for when companies provide services free of charge.

In summary if you sell your time and use Basecamp from 37signals for project management or online collaboration then bcToolkit is a Basecamp reporting tool or Basecamp Add on that will give you business changing information on your efficiency, productivity and profitability.

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Whilst the community manager is an increasingly popular (and completely relevant) client-side role, it is still a tough business case to justify these days. It is an even more challenging situation for agencies. In many cases, the agency will only have exposure to certain aspects of the client’s business or social media is only a bit-part of their overall client portfolio.

How then, as an business, with shared resource and a finite budget can you plan your social media activity to ensure that you are where you need to be, when you need to be?

The following is a guide or at the very least, a collection of ideas on how you can evaluate the requirements of your audience and assign time (maybe even cost) to you community management activities. Once you understand these factors, you can then understand how much time you need to spend on it and run a better business whilst keeping everybody happy.

As a caveat too, some of this is very basic social media strategy, but all roads lead to Rome…

1. Assess your marketplace
Understand the basic volumes of conversation taking place about:

• You
• Your Products
• Your Competitors
• The Sector

Understanding the volumes and nature of discussions relating to you gives you an indication of the scale of the task ahead and help you work out:

• How long it will take to read through all the mentions (monthly/daily)
• How many are mentions, how many are more valuable threads of conversation
• How many people you need to respond to
• How many people you need to follow

Delving deeper into the actual nature of conversations then allows you to understand the very nature of what is being said, thereby allowing you to understand what back-office workflow needs to exist.

Estimated time (monthly): 1 day to review all findings
Estimated time (daily): 2 hours per day (6 times per day in 20-minute bursts per hour)

2. Clarify your commercial objectives
Be clear on what it is you want to achieve. Each objective has its own “rate of change”, and pace at which the audience will tolerate your intervention:

• Increased sales – can happen quickly, but audiences are hyper-sensitive to forced selling messages. Typically a slow-burner.
• Improved customer satisfaction – answering questions quickly can rapidly increase satisfaction but should be done little and often
• Raise Awareness – a quick-win which can work well in a short-term burst
• Help Understanding – again, can be done quickly with assistance little and often

Understanding the “extent” of your objective(s) helps you to put a realistic timescale on how much you can achieve in any given period. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that you can carry out a “trial” period of activity – if you start solving people’s problems, disappearing can be inflammatory and make people doubt your motives.

Estimated time (monthly): ½ day to review performance against activity

3. Find a middle ground – the meaty strategy part
Finding the middle ground is the place where commercial objectives meet acceptable approaches to audience. This is where the strategy is put together. Spend time on this. Use insights, use common sense, but make sure you plan with your ears.

There is no hard-and-fast rule for how long a strategy *should* take to build, but it needs to ensure that all areas of the business are aware of how the plan affects them, and in due course, how they need to be available to facilitate the creation of content or assist with enquiries.

Estimated time (one-off): 5 days to ensure all areas of the business are covered in “the masterplan”

4. Channel Assessment
Strategy defined, you now need to look primarily at two areas:

• What channel KPI’s meet the commercial objective
• What proportion of your time needs to spent where

As rules of thumb go, you should look to spend an appropriate % of time in each channel as your media type split shows, i.e. if your media split looks like this, you probably need to reflect that in your own media mix and time management

Total number of monthly mentions: 5,000

• Blogs – 20% – 1,000 mentions: 250/500 (posts/comments)
• News – 25% – 1,250 mentions
• Facebook – 10% – 500 mentions: 84/416 (posts/thread comments/likes)
• Twitter – 40% – 2,000 tweets: 1300/125/500/75 (mentions/@/RT/lists)
• Video – 5% – 250: 240/10 (views/comments)

Take the 100% of your budgeted time and divide it up according to the media split…

From a time management point of view, here you are looking to determine:

• How frequently you need to post and to which channel
• When you need to post (day and time)
• How many people are needed to create the content

5. The strategy vs budget calculation
So, you’ve started at one end of the line – this is what you would LIKE to do in an ideal world, but reality sinks in and you’ve now got to think about how you can squeeze all of this into the client’s budget which is based on little more than a hunch and what they could slice off the PR retainer. How do you make it work?

One way is to work backwards form the sum of money up for grabs (on retainer) and balance that with your media split. i.e.:

• £2,500 per month budget
• = 5 days work
• = 35 hours
• daily rate of £70/hr

Now take your media split:

• Blogs – 20% – (of £2,500) = £500 (1 day)
• News – 25% – no action needed
• Facebook – 10% – £250 (1/2 day)
• Twitter – 40% = £1,000 (2 days)
• Video – 5% = £125 (1/4 days)

So, in your insights-guided content strategy you have:

• Blog posts that need writing per month
• Facebook comments/likes that need responding to/creating
• Twitter posts that need creating and responding too (and don’t forget may need investigating behind the scenes too)
• Video comments need moderating

In which case, let’s assume that:

• Blog posts will take 3 hours to create (1 hour to research, 1 ¾ hours to write, ¼ hour to review)
• Facebook comments/status’s/links take 2 minutes each to post
• Tweets will take 1 minute each to respond to/create
• Moderation video comments takes 1 minute to review and confirm

This gives us a total resource allocation of:

• Blogs – 20% – (of £2,500) = £500 (1 day) = 2/3 blog posts per month (including comment moderation)
• Facebook – 10% – £250 (1/2 day) = 105 status updates/likes/posts created/responded to per month
• Twitter – 40% = £1,000 (2 days) = 840 tweets created/responded to
• Video – 5% = £125 (1/4 days) = 100 comments reviewed and moderated.

So, in short, for your monthly RETAINER, Client X gets:

• 3 blog posts (i.e. 1500 researched, media-rich and linked-out words)
• 105 Facebook items posted/interacted with
• 840 tweets created/responded to
• 100 video comments

Doesn’t seem much…or does it? The biggest caveat to add to these working is the natural ebb and flow of content – looking at these base figures, one can guarantee that the flow of content on Faebook for example will mean that something will need sacrificing elsewhere if you are to stay on budget.

Blog posts may become very popular and be RT all over twitter compelling you to spend more time on Twitter than you’d estimated. Equally, the popularity of the blog post may mean that more content is needed – but where is THAT going to come from?

Images need sourcing, product needs finding, staff need interviewing, videos needs shooting or editing…you get the picture.

6. Spreading your time
The next natural dilemma is now when to spend your time doing what.

Given that we have (in our retainer example anyway), got a potential maximum of 28 hours of community management to create (7 hours is allotted to time-controllable blog posts), and we are now looking at how we spend our time throughout the day.

Blog posts can be planned, community management less-so. The trick is to do, in most cases, little and often, with monitoring running in the background at all times. Use the workflow system in most tools to alert you to particularly urgent issues as and when they arise, or assign the issue to someone who can help directly with an issue/sale query.

Whilst the idea of contributing 20-30 minutes per hour may seem a little challenging, the reality is that this amount of time is actually really practical to manage (an amount of time on which the much-respected Pomodoro Techniques is based) and still provides you enough time to complete something of value – and is probably as good an excuse as any to not have to attend those other time-drains of your time, meetings!

7. The Harsh Reality
At the end of the day, we all want to do a great job for our clients, but even for a pretty average retainer value such as this, it is likely easier to go OVER budget than to stick to it.

However, understanding from the very start, the scale of discussions set against your objectives gives you a platform for deciding, if budgets are indeed pinched, how and where to prioritise your time so that it is used more effectively.

Once this realisation has been made, it is then far easier to break down the channel activity by content, then people, then time.

Whilst some of these guidelines appear quite strict and almost military in their thinking, as an agency owner particularly, time is your product and you owe it to yourself and your employees to manage that time as best you can.

Humans are, if nothing else, unpredictable, so to live your online community management by at least some of these guidelines ensures that you will be around helping customers and their customers for many more years to come.

I think what’s really surprised us is that so many of these services are developed BY Basecamp users FOR Basecamp users so you are safe in the knowledge that these are just services looking to jump on any kind of bandwagon. They will really help you make the most of your precious time. So, in an attempt to show some of our friends some love, we have listed below, what we see as being THE definitive list of 3rd party applications for Basecamp.

As a result of strict time management guidelines we know we ‘ve probably missed a few, SO IF YOU WANT TO ADD SOMEONE ELSE, LET US KNOW IN THE COMMENTS!

Mobile Apps (for time management on the go)