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Review of PlannerX – an add-on to Basecamp.
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| PlannerX review | 2009-04-10 13:52 | Review of PlannerX – an add-on to Basecamp. |
I've used Basecamp for a couple of years at my previous job, my business, and ministry. It revolutionized the way we interact with our customers and project teams. It allowed us to keep project artifacts central and everyone on the same page on expectations, timelines, etc.
However, there are areas of project management where Basecamp is lacking. Instead of trying to be everything to everybody, the Basecamp guys chose to stay focused on what their product is best at – collaboration. The logic behind this reasoning can be found in their excellent book, available here, also for free online reading.
The story didn't end there, lucky for us – end users. A Basecamp API was created, which opened opportunity for enterpreneurs to create tools that add onto Basecamp's functionality. There is vast array of these available for areas like billing, time tracking, planning, etc. Complete list can be found here.
One of those tools is PlannerX which appears to cater to project managers that are looking for a good and easy way to make project plans.
PlannerX might help you to set up your project plan up front. It might save you considerable amount of time, especially for bigger projects. Not bad for $9/month or $90/year.
After you are done with your project plan and the project kicks off, you should probably log out of PlannerX and not use it for the same project again.
My overall feel of this tool is that it is in early beta and has a good amount of user feedback to go through before becoming a mature application.
Nirav Mehta wrote:
Thanks for your review of PlannerX. We are constantly improving and your feedback has helped us.
A few comments:
1. We got requests for master Gantt chart. We are evaluating this and working on how best to show it.
2. Completed items turn gray. This is subtle now, and in our upgrades we are going to make completed items italic. We are also adding a completion checkbox – so that you can complete items right from PlannerX.
3. Good idea about late milestones. We will try and add that too!
4. Sorting has some technical limitation. We are inclined towards disabling it to avoid confusion.
5. We had to use obscure shortcuts because we wanted things to work across all browsers. Most OS level shortcuts will be caught by the browser itself. We hope they are not too difficult to learn. At the same time, keyboard navigation is one of PlannerX's biggest strength.
6. We use GetSatisfaction for our support system. We want to encourage user participation and are committed to open conversations.
7. It's not "undefined milestone" it's "Unknown Milestone". All the items without a milestone go under "Unknown Milestone".
:-)
Would love to hear further feedback as you use it more.
Thanks.
Posted on 18-Apr-09 at 5:17 am | Permalink