We are looking for an organization-wide project management tool. We are a O365 and G-Suite church. We have many departments all using different tools (Asana, Microsoft Planner, Slack, Basecamp) and would like to find one solution for all departments for collaborating and sharing projects. We are looking at Teams and Basecamp.
What are people using out there? What would you recommend from your experience?
Cheers!
Tim Nunn
Systems Administrator
Xenos Christian Fellowship
Hi Tim. Teams is a collaboration tool, like Slack, vs a real project management tool. However, if you donât need a lot of complex features, Planner can be added to a tab in Teams. In fact, when you create a team, a Plan is created automatically, you just have to add the tab to the interface. Interestingly, Asana, Trello, Wrike, and a number of other similar products can also be added to Teams as well.
Personally Iâve used both Planner and Basecamp, and I like Planner/Teams better, but Iâm sure opinions will vary.
I agree, Teams is not a project management tool in and of itself, but Planner is a very entry-level and basic task manager/assigner.
Personally, Iâve found Teams + Planner to be sufficient for most of what I need. By having everyone use the same system, it puts us all on the same page, and since Teams is where group files and conversations live, it adds value to put task assignments there too.
I have used and enjoyed Basecamp and Trello, but I donât even consider them an option for teams I lead because I like having everything in one place.
Hey Tim!
We use Basecamp for our project management. As Joel and Chris said, Teams by itself is geared towards collaboration. We attempted to use the Planner integration, but what I really didnât like was that every time you created a âPlanâ it created an Office 365 group, SharePoint site, etc. along with it and in the spirit of keeping things tidy, I wasnât quite ready to unleash that into our environment.
On the Basecamp front, our Communications department has been using Basecamp for YEARS, and I wouldnât dream of trying to take that away from them. Then, our Senior Leadership Team started looking into it (previously utilizing Asana) and the decision was made to make it available to the organization as the âofficial project management platformâ. One of the features we like the most about Basecamp is the Template feature. We utilize that to create a project for when a new staff member is on-boarding, transitioning to a new role, or off-boarding. Our Pre-School ministry loves it for Easter planning and Baby Dedications as the plans are pretty much the same from year-to-year.
There are still a couple of things that I wish Basecamp had, such as Gantt-chart, progress indicators, native file viewing, the ability to create a template from a current project, etc⌠but overall it is a very simple tool to use and not that expensive for Non-Profit pricing ($899/year).
Hi Tim,
We recently transitioned our entire staff over to Airtable. We tried using Basecamp in the past and it didnât work too well for our setup. We currently use Slack as a messaging platform and use Airtable now as a way of organizing all of our projects that we have ongoing within our church. Hope this helps!
We have been an O365 and G Suite org as well, and also have a number of different departments using multiple different tools. Itâs actually a bit eerie how similar our situations are.
We have been using Basecamp, but we have found severe limitations in the way it works. There is basically no permission structure, and if we were a profit corp that dealt with clients, it would probably be ok, but we have some pretty high security standards. Itâs a bit scary that Jane in Human Resources could decide to add anyone she wants to a projectâŚwhenever she feels like it.
We have a JIRA trial and are seriously looking at implementing it as a replacement for Spiceworks (what the IT department has been using for ticketing for the last several years, andâŚalso find it pretty limiting). We are hoping that after we work out the kinks as an IT Help Desk tool we can also roll it out to other departments and allow for more cross department communication / project management / collaboration.
Weâve been evaluating Help Desk / ITSM solutions, but I think many of them can operate as project managers. If youâre interested I can shoot you the Google Sheet of the ones we evaluated and the notes of why we decided not to use them.