I work for a company of 300+ with multiple offices. I am currently using Basecamp as my own personal project management tool for work. A few colleagues of mine are giving it a try as well. We would like to start introducing it to more and more departments, with the hope of someday using it company-wide.

A big potential problem I see is the distribution of projects across the different branches and departments. Having 300 people all within the same “owner company” doesn’t seem like a good idea, either. Since we have multiple offices, being able to add a separate “company” for each office or department (therefore having people assigned to their correct office/department, and with the correct address and contact information for that office) would be very helpful. Not being able to give newly-created companies permission to create projects is preventing me from doing this.

In addition, being able to assign one administrator per company would be great as well. Being an administrator now means you see every project across the entire BC account. For as many project as we’ll have going at once, that could be very intimidating.

Does anyone use Basecamp at a similarly sized company, or have any tips on managing so many users?

I’ve been thinking about the same issues. The small company I worked for (~50 people) was recently acquired by a large (>900 people) company. Our projects aren’t so complex that we need a more complex tool; however, the organization is more complex. That’s what I’ve been struggling with.

• Allow different groups to purchase their own Basecamp accounts
• Use the API to build a user synchronization process (and user account deletion process)
• Build an internal Basecamp Start page with a list of links to the Basecamp accounts

I would be interested in hearing other ideas. I really like the constraints of Basecamp and shudder to think of having to implement one of those bloated project management tools.

I work in a large company which nevertheless has a small potential Basecamp user base.

Certainly our client departments are currently being added as companies – the company approach suits me fine at the moment as I can also add external consultancies who work with us. My core team only is set up with access to all new projects – other people in my department are in the master list of people and can be added to a project as required, otherwise they stay ‘on the bench’.

Twebb’s idea for an internal Basecamp start page could be implemented by including aggregated RSS feeds for each different account, so providing a summary of all activity. This could be useful for high-level overviews. But when it comes to multiple Basecamp accounts, it goes without saying that there is a lot of potential for duplication of data, users, and repetition of effort. Some Basecamps could thrive, others die on the vine (different people may not champion Basecamp). A single Basecamp account with a Basecamp Admin / Support might be the way to go – if a department wants to set up a new project, they just ask for it to be added, then they can take it from there.

A one account approach may be doable; however, user management could be a challenge. Because projects are still executed by smaller teams, and the key stakeholders are normally just a subset of the larger organization, there is a need to partition views of the system. Obviously Basecamp permissions can handle this but it’s not easy to manage.

• Inability to use “Add to all future projects”. It wouldn’t be a relevant feature for any user except a Basecamp administrator and perhaps a high level executive who really wanted to see the complete picture on the dashboard.
• Adding users to groups. When a new person joins a group within the organization they often have to be added to all projects that are relevant for the group. That is a tedious process if there are more than a handful of projects to add them to.
• Deleting users. In any company it is important to turn off access to systems immediately upon termination of a relationship with an employee or vendor. With potentially hundreds of internal users and hundreds of client users this would be a challenge.

I’m going to apologize in advance because I don’t have the time at present to comment as fully as I want or you deserve.

I will say this, I work for a company that sports 10,000+ employees, distributed over 25+ countries and 50+ offices, and we coordinate project work (engineering) with other similarly sized companies.

Specifically, we’re using basecamp at present to coordinate software support (I’m a programmer / analyst / code monkey) for engineering projects (but don’t think help desk application). We typically have to perform custom programming to augment the functionality of off the shelf engineering software (eg CADD, databases ad nauseum) and / or (programatically) respond to challenges as they emerge.

Of course it would be completely ridiculous to grant all employees access to a given basecamp, never mind an individual basecamp project.

Basically we create a project for each major initiative or response. We identify the key people that need to have access to the project in all the vested companies. Typically we’ve found this to be in the order of 5 to 30 people max, more often at the low end.

We don’t use basecamp as the end all be all information dissemination tool. No. It’s our collaboration tool for the movers and shakers. For mass information distribution we use our web site and intranet.

As our use of basecamp grows we will likely subscribe to more basecamps as required. At present I’m managing 3 paid sites, one of which is for my own projects (and sanity).

While basecamp isn’t perfect, it’s a good collaboration tool, and I’m counting on 37 Signals to respond to emerging requirements common to the majority of their customers by intelligently, and carefully implementing new ability and behavior as is appropriate – which is what they’ve done to date. Consider this an unsolicited ‘At a boy 37 Signals (please don’t let me down) – I’ve got a lot banking on this’.

Gotta run. Cheers.

Michael.

I have currently about 60 users on basecamp and use the company facilty to set up projects under key project sponsers resonsible for the relevant sub set of projects – this seems to work pretty well – set up a dummy company as the name of the sponser and allow this company to access – this will then lead to projects seeming to be organised a little !

for those using multiple accounts how does it work with indiviuals appearing in both?? do they have to sign in twice to get visibility of milestones etc – would love to know

I work in an academic research library with approx. 150 permanent employees. We have a single Basecamp account.

Library departments are treated like “companies” within the overall basecamp presence, and we add other organizations as “companies” when we need to add their people to a project team. At this time there are approx. 130 people on board, 100 or so from within the library.

We do a lot of cross-departmental projects, many involving partners from other campus units, other universities, state agencies, etc. Basecamp is very useful in this distributed environment because it is so easy to add partners whether or not they have access to our secure intranet or the overall university network.

FWIW I like the perspective offered by a single account, but can certainly understand how this could get unwieldy in a larger organization with a more disparate set of activities. We don’t have an admin in every department, but have two or three people with admin permissions in the Systems department, and a couple more in other areas. Hope this helps!