I’m evaluating Basecamp for use at our company (we’re a Marketing/Communications service provider). We currently use Bugzilla for all project management – not exactly for what it was intended. I like what I see in Basecamp, but am not sure it suits the style of our management.

Does anyone know how a manager could generate a list of all of the projects that were assigned to his/her direct reports (short of logging in as them to do so). The purpose of this being so that they could then review the list periodically with that person in one on one meetings.

I tried assigning ownership to a project by putting something like “Project Lead = [Persons Name]” in the Overview Page Announcement and then running a Search on the [Persons Name] (brackets are just to weed out any other mentions of the name), but the Search funtion doesn’t search on the Project level.

Any suggestions?

Basecamp actually does this really well. You can see “To-Dos” or “Milestones” assigned per person by clicking on each respective tab from your dashboard, then filtering the screen using the “Show items assigned to:” drop-down. You can also do this within a specific project to see project-specific assignments.

This only works for items that have not been checked off. For checked off items, I would recommend making it mandatory that all team members track time on all To-Do items. You can then use the “Time” tab from the main dashboard or in a specific project to see what was accomplished and how long it took to complete. I also add the estimated time per task (i.e. Create Web Pages x 10 – (10 Hours)) so that I can easily compare the tracked time to the original estimate.