How do you deal with ongoing projects? What I mean by this is, say you have a website development project; the website launches, but then you have small minor updates (change picture of president, add additional board member name to list, etc.), how do you handle these? They really don’t justify having their own project. Yet, if you have just one project and keep adding to-do’s, the project will become very cluttered over time. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Dean

My favourite projects are those that have become “cluttered” with data.
Makes for a very satisfying archive process.

We keep projects alive until we have a final debrief which happens after those inevitable, post sign-off, alts.

Hi Oscar,

The problem that I have is that we will maintain a website for years. Yes, building additional functionality could be added as a separate project, but there will always be minor updates throughout the years. Do I need to keep a separate project open for each of my clients just for this type of thing or is there a better way?

Thanks

This is something we’ve encountered as we also maintain websites for years that have some specific technical elements so the requests often go beyond just “change this content”.

We do track each client under maintenance as a separate project. The main reason for this is because we make heavy use of the Time Tracking features in Basecamp and this is the easiest way to report/bill on that time. (Does it get invoiced? Does it go against a pre-paid support contract? Is it warranty work? Did we estimate correctly? etc.)

Also, it makes sense for the support project to have the correct people/companies associated with it.

If a support request becomes more complex than just “complete this single task”, ie. it has multiple Milestones, likely requiring drafts of changes and approval / sign off from the client, then it will often be spun off into yet another project. Some of this has to do with the fact that we have additional controls and reporting to the client built around how we use Basecamp.

Once I bit the bullet and upgraded from Plus (35 projects max) to Premium (100 projects max) it was like a huge weight had been lifted and I was able to get more power out of Basecamp because I was able to spawn new projects as needed. I hope to have to upgrade to Max (Unlimited projects) by this time next year, because that will mean that business is good!