After you have read this article on TeamworkPM (and the comments, don’t miss the comments), don’t miss our analysis of how to use the brand new Observer Status to double your agency’s productivity in Teamwork. The new integrated Teamwork Desk solves incoming shared email woes once and for all.
We’ve been using Basecamp to run Foliovision since 2004. We’ve loved Basecamp and then liked it a little less when 37signals forced us to use their branding. We moved to the 37signals Suite as soon as it became available. We’ve literally got 300 projects in Basecamp and even had 235 of them active until recently. I did a bit of housecleaning and brought that down to about 150 as Basecamp becomes very unwieldy with a large number of projects.
So if we’ve built a relatively large business with Basecamp and have so many projects in there why would we leave?
It’s exactly that: Basecamp was great up until a certain point. For the last couple of years, the appalling search has been a real burden. The poor search is surprising as lead developer David Heinemeier Hansson is brilliant, even if he spends a lot of time in race cars these days.
David Heinemeier Hansson in the winner’s circle
David, why could you guys not put some decent search code into Basecamp (SOLR for instance) and allows us to sort by date and relevance as a minimum? It’s a week’s work. You claim 8,000,000 projects managed by Basecamp in your marketing materials. That’s a lot of unhappy users, wasting a lot of time searching with what cannot be found with your broken search.
Basecamp search results with no order by date: why oh why?
Dates are all over the place sometimes putting results from 2007 ahead of 2013
At one point, I’d almost had enough of 37signals slow updates but then there was a miraculous update to Highrise a few years ago which made it useable. I thought perhaps this would happen to the other products. The introduction of the flat rate Suite was a blessing for those of us with a bunch of different accounts (Basecamp, Backpack and Highrise).
Then came New Basecamp. The launch was a fiasco. At first 37signals wanted us legacy users to pay for both systems if we used both. Typical 37signals arrogance. After seeing an almost zero adaption rate, they smartened up and changed the system to allow you a free New Basecamp plan in line with your existing Basecamp plan. But by that point the excitement was gone.
We don’t like the new Basecamp and can’t use it. Missing in action:
- Private items. We don’t want to run parallel projects to be able to talk about the messy details out of the client’s site. While I’m a big advocate of transparency and fairly often talk about too technical matters in front of the client, it’s a big mistake, often frustrating the client. “Making me feel stupid” is something which has been written sometimes: don’t do it. Not all of us have the technically gifted clients which 37signals probably enjoys when they do client work. Another reason the New Basecamp doesn’t include private items is 37signals does not do client work anymore. 37signals are out of touch with why Basecamp was created: a way to manage client projects.
- Time tracking. We bill clients. Running parallel task and time tracking systems costs Foliovision about 10% of staff time as they just try to keep reasonable notes on what they are doing so that they get paid and so that clients get billed. 37signals does not. They just don’t give a toss. Time tracking integration between Freshbooks and Basecamp Classic was never good enough to want to fully implement as you had to keep a whole lot of things in sync (people/projects). Creating better time tracking and time tracking integration is not easy. The engineers at 37signals could have done so if they cared. They didn’t.
- Migration. Migration was dicey as the feature set was more limited. Surprisingly, there is a lot of manual work to move a project from Basecamp Classic to New Basecamp.
New Basecamp looks great but can’t do very much: no time tracking, no private items
let’s not even get started talking about GANTT/resource charts or other tools to
scale project management and/or improve efficiency in even a midsize company
Deep issues with Basecamp Classic apart from the weak time tracking include:
- Slow. Basecamp has always been slow. Ruby on Rails let’s you build great looking apps fast, but it’s always been a bit heavy.
- Search. As described above, Basecamp search is appalling. I literally lose hours looking for design files and specs from four or five years ago. We keep our clients for many years, many of our projects have been open for five years or more.
- Retirement. Basecamp Classic which is still pretty good software has been retired. None of the above will be getting better any time soon. 37signals customer support is snippy and condescending about it.
Basically, 37signals have put us in a position where there is no way forward for us with them. Outside of project management, we’ve never really loved Highrise the way we loved Basecamp, although it’s been much better since a few years ago. Strangely Highrise has never been properly integrated with Basecamp: client contact info at a minimum should be shared between the two applications.
As a CRM, we always liked Javelin/CapsuleCRM a bit better but at $12/user we preferred the Highrise flat fee model. Especially when 37signals put the unlimited suite package together at $149 and later $249 for us. Yet, in terms of per user billing, it turns out most of the people in Foliovision do not need access to our CRM (and probably shouldn’t have). The CRM is for sales and admin. That’s all of 2.5 people here in Foliovision. The other thirty have more important work to do for the clients already in project management. So the flat rate issues is a smaller one than I thought. So by leaving Basecamp we can have a better CRM environment with better email integration and can finally get on with some projects for which the Highrise process overhead was just a bit too high.
Returning to project management, all of those Basecamp issues with speed, search, features, privacy and time tracking are solved in TeamworkPM.
- Search whatever you want however you want. The search is really sophisticated, allowing you to cast both wide and narrow nets. Sure it’s not a single box, but neither is Google at the end of the day (advanced users use all kinds of query syntax like site:domain.com or – just to get through their day).
- Time tracking is awesome: just track wherever you are and assign it to a task. When you are done the integration with Freshbooks is a bit counterintuitive at first but is brilliant in its simplicity. Basically you don’t try to match the people in Freshbooks but just dump all the hours, notes and rates straight into a Freshbooks invoice assigned to a client. Then press send. I no longer have to keep parallel structures in both project management and billing. Hurray, hurray, hurray. This is the feature which made the business case for the hassle of making the switch.
- Privacy is very granular for every item. I’d even say it’s too granular and fiddly. But I’ll get used to it. Much better than no options at all.
- Writeboards/Notebooks are searchable at last so we don’t need to create a separate company wiki (yet more software and logins for our team to manage).
- Notebooks export to quality html with a single click (HTML view) plus copy so we don’t have download Writeboards, open them up and edit them to get drafts into WordPress or other CMS.
- TeamworkPM has the same unlimited user pricing model as Basecamp/37signals. Thank you again. We have a lot of people working part time and paying for project management per user is so Salesforce and antisocial.
- We can even take our projects and put them on our own subdomain without branding. Thank you TeamworkPM, this was the feature which closed the deal.
- Product Improvement. TeamworkPM are actively improving their product. TeamworkPM like users and like to make things better, sometimes even adding too many features. But they are quite good at making the extra features fairly invisible so clients can still use TeamworkPM without too much coaching or too many tears. There are even GANTT charts (beta).
- Support. TeamworkPM are ready to go into the backend and run database queries when necessary to clean up import issues. I cannot imagine 37signals offering this kind of help on anything but the most exceptional basis. In the 37signals universe, there is almost only user error. If the product doesn’t work right, it’s the bioware. The dedication of the support team at TeamworkPM makes difficult issues child play.
TeamworkPM search granular preferences
It was not an easy decision. Any switch of system annoys (busy) clients and takes time for staff retraining (staff use more sophisticated features). Right now we still need to get our files back (TeamworkPM’s migrator is broken in this regard, they could move the files via API if they wanted to) and put everyone’s headshot back up – with 300 plus people in Basecamp just adding the headshots back is a substantial project. We’ll try to use the built-in gravatar functionality but it’s broken too (gravatars turn up very low res in TeamworkPM): workaround is to hand upload all the headshots. Basecamp API let’s us grab the headshots but TeamworkPM API does not allow us to add them.
But all of these are details in the larger scheme of things. The two to four hours per week each team member at Foliovision will save time tracking will pay for the costs and productivity loss of migration within two or three weeks.
TeamworkPM design cutdown the way we like it for client view with no distractions
we’ve removed Time | Milestones | Billing | Files | Risk Register | Links
available tools can be customised per project and per client
the background colour (customisable) matches Foliovision
company colours: login screen is even better
On the plus side for 37signals:
- 37signals products look much better than other project management tools. Looks are important. Enough so that we could put up with the technical limitations for a very long time (nine years).
- 37signals take security and privacy very seriously. I haven’t heard of a data breach in nine years as an attentive customer and haven’t seen anything close to data leakage in my use of their products.
- 37signals are stable. They’ve been making money and running their own servers for a long time. They’ve refused many offers of buyouts and appear to be in it for the long haul. TeamworkPM is now sufficiently stable at this point (two offices, one in Ireland, one in Australia) so almost equal points to them. TeamworkPM are still cutting corners though, moving the core application out to Amazon instead of maintaining their own high quality infrastructure (two data centers would be enough). To be honest, the MySQL export goes a long way to giving me confidence. If TeamworkPM ever cripple the product with too many features (a real danger) or go belly up or get bought out, we can take our data and run. Login is now on a subdomain of foliovision.com so we could do a migration to Chiliproject (a Redmine fork) and be up and running within a week (albeit with a smaller feature set).
- 37signals believe in building and not patenting. We applied for a single patent in the project management are a couple of years ago for an important innovation which we came up with. While doing due diligence, I couldn’t find a patent assigned to 37signals or its owners. That shows principle and putting your money where your mouth is. Respect.
The main issue over at 37signals is that since they don’t do client work anymore, they are living in an ideal bubble. People have salaries, they work on features, products get done. It’s sort of like a Marxist paradise what they have going on over there. To each according to his contribution, with a big enough pie to keep everyone happy. It would be wonderful if we could all live like that.
If on the other hand you still face clients and hourly billing, 37signals software is the wrong tool these days. In the meantime, TeamworkPM is a great solution to our issues.
Alec Kinnear
Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.
Thanks, Alec, for the thorough comparison of Basecamp and TeamworkPM. I tried many PM services including Basecamp (classic). I used Rule.fm for a while, but most of my clients and subcontractors found it non-intuitive, especially the way discussions work (or not!). I decided to try Basecamp one more time before canceling my account and found the new Basecamp brilliantly simple. It was attractive, flexible and easy for clients to adopt. I agree with you on many of its shortcomings – time tracking and Freshbooks integration especially – but I respect their slow upgrade practice. It has remained simple, attractive and flexible enough to adapt to any type of project. I have about 40 projects running now, but perhaps when I get over 200 I will find it unwieldy as well. Hopefully by then 37signals will have improved it. We’ll see.
Hi Scott,
We have had some client questions about the complexity of our new project management interface while we are waiting for TeamworkPM to run a batch set of permission changes, cutting back the interface to the minimalism we prefer on the cleint side. Hopefully Dan will get around to those changes soon.
I’ve also been doing some thinking about the no privacy rule in New Basecamp. Quite honestly many people in our team have been abusing privacy to keep things from the clients eyes which really should be visible (although the client shouldn’t be actively included in the discussion as it’s not necessary). I’m thinking about putting a rule which is that Task Lists must stay public and anything which someone wants to make private has to go into a Private Message. Increasing the friction of going private will hopefully stop our team’s innate tendency to obfuscation (it’s partly a cultural thing I think: there’s a tendency to secretiveness here).
On the other hand, hoping for much improvement in Basecamp or 37signals products is optimistic. The consistency is great but 37signals really appear to be resting on their laurels a bit (when you’re top dog…). Particularly frustrating for me over the years has bee that there is no useful integration between Highrise and Basecamp. At a minimum, why should I have to change client data in two places?
In contrast, CapsuleCRM fully integrates with Freshbooks (an external app) so that client data stays up to date even when it changes. Moreover, when I look at a client in CapsuleCRM I see their full historical spend at Foliovision. This is really valuable data to see on a regular basis. It’s this kind of thinking – services enhancing one another – which is the next step on the web.
Repetitive data entry and complex process is such a burden of our information age. 37signals could be doing a lot more to minimise this. 37signals could also try to get ahead of the curve and add some truly useful integrations instead of just exposing an API (which was a good first step back in 2005).
One reason we gave up on Basecamp is that when we tried third party integrations via API much of our database was destroyed. Fortunately (and unbelievably enough) we had our own backups via API from AscentList which we were able to pipe back in. Most users would NOT be in a position to do this kind of repair and would have lost a lot of important project information. Expecting 37signals to help with any kind of restore would also be optimistic (the support is better than it was when Jason Fried manned the help desk himself but is still fairly unhelpful in relative terms).
When we saw the havoc the third party integrations could wreak I became a lot keener to find an integrated solution where I could count on the vendor to provide some support for issues.
I wish you’d written a blog post about your frustrations with Basecamp, i would have piped up and told you about our app, http://www.triggerapp.com
Much like teamwork PM, it integrates with freshbooks, but allows you to sync your clients and invoices. So time is logged, in assigned tasks in trigger, where you can generate an invoice, then you can simply send that invoice to freshbooks.
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Hi Mariel,
Trigger certainly looks nice from the outside (I’ve just seen the screenshots). I had a look at the pricing and I hate it.
We have 50 people inside Foliovision and we’d be paying $400/month or $5000/year to use Trigger as opposed to a flat $150/month or $1800/year.
For whole team collaboration, we do not use per user SAAS software. It’s basically siphoning one’s profits off somewhere else.
For all my criticism of 37signals over the years, they did get one thing right: tiered pricing which is based on usage and not on team members.
Trigger also looks like it’s following TeamworkPM down the path to hell with featuritis. I’m wrestling now with the horrid and totally unnecessary image viewer inside TeamworkPM which crashes my Fluid browsers.
Fortunately TeamworkPM usually manages to hide the extra gunk fairly well (back buttons have stopped working on a lot of screens though: I’m going to have to have a talk with Daniel Mackey about browser crippling). Core browser functions should continue to work even in web applications.
Good luck with Trigger. Sounds like a good solution for small teams if you have good Basecamp import.
Making the web work for you, Alec
Hi Alec,
Thanks so much for the feedback. Trigger is more suited to small teams who are looking for a single tool to do the majority of their ‘paperwork’. Alot of the features implemented after they’ve been suggested and voted on by users. It works well to keep our subscribers happy.
We did have a subscription system which we changed due to user demand. It sounds like a good idea to cap that off at a number of users, so bigger firms can at least trial us out before stoping at the pricing page.
Thanks again for the feedback. We are still building trigger. and all feedback is valuable. :)
What a great detailed review. Just wondering if you considered activecollab.com/ It has a self hosted version which allows unlimited users
Hi Vincent,
I played around with ActiveCollab a few years ago but performance was awful and the licensing was complex and user unfriendly.
We much prefer putting all administration and security in the hands of TeamworkPM in this case as it saves us hundreds of dollars every month in internal administration of the tool.
If we went self-hosted we looked closely at Redmine and its clones like Chiliproject. We’d prefer true open source than be throttled by a restrictive license.
Making the web work for you, Alec
We’ve been using TeamworkPM for years. Made the switch from Basecamp (nearly unusable for us) to Teamwork and haven’t looked back. Haven’t even considered looking at other PM systems… we just love Teamwork! Hundreds of projects and probably over 1,000 users.
Our hang up is that we’re still using Highrise for our CRM. It’s not good, but I can’t seem to find a solution that will work. We’re simple on the sales side, so Highrise is doable, but i’m looking for something that will more fully integrate with Teamwork. I’ve been asking Teamwork for years to release a CRM module, and they keep promising, but no luck yet. Basically, I want a seamless “sync” between highrise and Teamwork. All sales communications, notes, deals, etc. would totally sync with Teamwork so there is complete visibility of sales information (highrise) by operations PM).
So, i’m thinking of finagling Teamwork into being our CRM. Looking at the sales cycle as just another “project”. Setup the customer / contact for every incoming prospective customer. Then, setup a project under that customer called “sales” and work the sales project. Keeping all communications, documents, etc. from the sales process within the sales project. Then, when they become a customer, rename the “sales” project to “operations” (or whatever) and everything stays with the customer.
I don’t know… is that a horrible idea? I just wish Teamwork would add some minor functionality to the company / contact level so we could use it just like highrise.
Any thoughts you all have on how I can make this work would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Ben!
We’ve entertained the idea of using TeamworkPM as a CRM/deal manager (company directory is pretty robust and is much faster now after I complained about load times long and hard). But fundamentally it’s like using a hammer on a nail.
We were on Highrise and moves to CapsuleCRM. What you don’t get with CapsuleCRM is flat pricing and privacy controls. On the other hand, CapsuleCRM is so much faster and trimmed for sail (Highrise is just creaky and awkward these days: you can feel that it’s not getting much love).
Still we do hate the per-user fees and consequently just have a small fraction of our team there. I’d suggest you stay in Highrise and code some API binding
What CapsuleCRM does for us is include a good Freshbooks bridge (but it’s just a little bit broken and Duncan won’t fix it) which almost made the migration worth it.
I’d had much higher hopes for CapsuleCRM support but all they ever do is tell you to go and vote on Uservoice (thanks but I have work to do) and don’t seem to fix much. Really feel a bit like I’m back with 37signals except with per user pricing. Though the deals module is pretty good.
TeamworkPM is another matter altogether. Daniel and Adrian and the guys are working hard every day to improve the application and communicate the improvements to users. Hopefully CapsuleCRM will improve their support and development cycle sometime.
I wish I had a clearer CSM answer for you. Again, I don’t think the migration pain is worth it away from Highrise: the flat fee to include the whole team is very, very attractive.
Thanks for sharing your experiences.
Thanks for the reply. So, quick small world deal… I saw “Connexus Church” on your client list. We have a very close relationship with their parent organization here in Atlanta.
Anyway, so I noticed that you all do custom programming. Why don’t you all develop an integration between Highrise and TeamworkPM? I hear the API’s on both are quite easy. We can split the cost and both have input on the feature-set. Then, you all can move back to Highrise and we can have a win-win where everything fully integrates with TeamworkPM.
Yes?
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the suggestion and offer. IMHO, the right way to build this bridge would be to make Highrise the master copy for address and contact info and then make Freshbooks/TeamworkPM draw on the info in Highrise to update their own info.
I’ll think about your proposal seriously. One drawback is that CapsuleCRM already has the Freshbooks part built (if a bit limited).
I agree: I’d love to be able to move all the people associated with a company into TeamworkPM when a project goes live.
What is on your feature list?
PS. We have another treat for you. We have a fantastic team manager interface to manage staff/tasks for TeamworkPM. Great for managing teams up to about 10 per manager and for keeping track of workload/priorities for each team member. We’ll put you on the beta test list when it goes live this month (we are already using it internally). The whole system runs off the API so there’s no new logins or data to enter: populates automatically.
Off the top of my head, in envision more of a sync tool. Something where you could select which Highrise fields to synch with which teamwork fields. In other words, I could select to sync (both ways) all companies / contacts. (This is big for us) Then, I could select to just push communications on the company level FROM highrise TO teamwork and post in the “messages” area. Notes FROM highrise TO teamwork in the notebook section. Documents FROM highrise TO teamwork files section. Tags could be synced both ways (I understand Teamwork is about to release tags). OR, if I didn’t want documents to transfer, then I could uncheck that as an option from the tool.
I’m assuming that the interface would require you to select which project to sync which data to, in case you had multiple projects for one customer. Perhaps something where a deal is won in highrise triggers the synch?
Not 100% sure, but some tool that would keep data in sync between systems.
@Ben- maybe you should look at Trigger? (www.triggerapp.com) We have both a Freshbooks, and Highrise integration. Today we should be releasing contact cards, so you can add your contacts into Trigger to use it as a simple CRM via a Highrise or Freshbooks sync. Or you can add them manually.
Sorry Alec, I don’t mean to spam your blog post comments, I just saw Ben was talking about a few things our app has. Again, might not be suitable, but you never know ! :)
Hi Ben,
Thanks for your explanation.
It seems to me that you are asking too much as soon as you get into two way sync (we’ve built lots of this). One way sync is far more reliable with a single master. Syncing should also be automatic and in the background.
Our interest is far simpler: in having a unified address book for our business (i.e. we update info once in Highrise/CapsuleCRM and it spreads out to TeamworkPM and Freshbooks). Moving files and notes over manually isn’t much of a problem for us (we’d just like to get the people moved over automatically when we open up a project from a deal).
Your plan would require months of programming and be liable to catastrophic failure (as long as sync is one way only a child database can ever be corrupted and the master remains clean).
Hi Mariel,
Thanks for stopping by.
There’s a couple of issues with your comment.
So trying Triggerapp would be a massive disruptive and unwelcome migration and increase our costs exponentially.
I do salute your integration with Freshbooks and Highrise. That’s a very nice suite.
Mariel:
I don’t use Freshbooks. We use a “real” accounting system as we deal with hundreds of millions of $.
Hi Alec,
I’ve just finished reading your post and the comments and I’d like to say thank you for the detailed review of Basecamp and TeamworkPM.
I’m in the process of implementing Basecamp (we’re Highrise users) and have had several conversations with their support desk to try to resolve some issues. I can say that they have been very responsive with their answers however none useful, e.g. no it doesn’t do that, or that feature is not available.
So I’m now looking at TeamworkPM as their pricing is very similar to Basecamp. With your understanding of both systems perhaps you can answer a quick question for me.
In TeamworkPM can you set up project templates like Basecamp but transfer ownership of the project and/or tasks within to someone other than the creator of the template? Currently in Basecamp the ownership and all subsequent notifications for it go to the creator of the template no matter who used it to build a project.
Thanks in advance, Jon.
Hi Jon,
Thanks for stopping by. The 37signals support answers would be hilarious if they were not so completely and utterly useless and unhelpful. I call 37signals style support “customer alienation policies”.
Templates in TeamworkPM work a bit differently than Basecamp. In TeamworkPM you create a model project which is like any other project and then you duplicate it. Which means you can easily create a set of projects with tasks assigned as you like. It does mean that you don’t get an automatic cascade of dates (which I think Basecamp does give you).
What we do not like in TeamworkPM right now and is gradually destroying our workflow are notifications. In Basecamp, clients kind of have to make an effort to message everyone in your company. They can do it, but they have to be pretty intent on it.
In TeamworkPM it’s very hard for people to see whom they are messaging. So what happens by default is that clients when they create new messages end up sending them to everybody. At Foliovision we struggle under the huge amount of incoming messages we face every day.
Remedies?
Neither of these are satisfactory and are creating a lot of tension within our team and with our clients.
We’ve come up with a better solution: observer status. Observers would have the following characteristics:
But TeamworkPM have shown very little interest in implementing observer status or any other remedy for unnecessary notifications (uncharacteristic for TeamworkPM: normally they are very helpful).
The final alternative would be for TeamworkPM to go with a Basecamp like set up for including people in messages (requires a lot of space and would be a big aesthetic change from the current hidden list of notifyees).
Until TeamworkPM do something about notifications though, if you open a lot of project with a lot of new or occasional clients (we have both), then you will face a lot of issues with unnecessary email traffic.
Drop by and let us know what you decide.
Making the web work for you, Alec
I’ve using Teamworkpm for years (since 2009) and in these years only had a couple of troubles but they response very well at the moment. There is only thing that I don’t like so much: Invoices. But collaborative task and everything else are so well.
I’m not such a fan but I’m a Happy teamworkpm user… and they are irish people.
Alec,
You mention a beta of a team manager. Is there any more room on the beta list? Or have you released that?
I just read your article and have signed up our team at idxguys for a teamworkpm account. I love the time tracking. That was a huge sore sopt for us.
Thanks, James
Hi James,
Our TeamworkPM version is working great now. I’ll check with Peter and make sure it’s possible to sign up for the TeamworkPM version (existing signup is for the Basecamp version).
Glad you guys are on board with TeamworkPM too. Aside from absolutely useless preferences for administrators and no ability to hide team members from clients (two sore spots for us as a larger organisation: hiding team members from clients is to reduce email load but to allow senior people to be present on simpler projects) TeamworkPM has worked out very well for us.
Hi Salvador,
I owe the world an article on how to use TeamworkPM and Freshbooks together for invoice nirvana. It turns out if you use Freshbooks you can just have a very small account with just you, your accountant and anyone creating estimates and do all the time tracking in TeamworkPM. Works absolutely fabulously.
Alec,
Thanks.
no ability to hide team members from clients. That is a big deal to us too.
I would even like to be able to hide team members from team members in some cases : )
Hi James,
Team members from team members would be tricky to program (need an ultra complicated permissions set up) but team members from clients would just be a third observer status (in project but not visible to client unless the observer actually comments on a thread but visible to team members).
I’d suggest dropping Daniel Mackey and Adrian Kerr at TeamworkPM a line asking for observer status, referring to this thread. They will know exactly what you are talking about.
Cheers!
Thanks for the excellent review of Basecamp and TeamworkPM. I’m looking for a task management solution for a small team (10-15 people), on a limited budget. The flat fee with unlimited users seems very appealing. Can you comment at all on reporting in TeamworkPM? I’d like to be able to pull reports on tasks in progress, time tracking, tasks completed, etc. Ideally these would be customizable and exportable to a spreadsheet. Would that kind of thing be asking too much of TeamworkPM, in your opinion?
Cheers, Allan
Why would you use either Basecamp or TeamworkPM, when their paid editions come with fewer features than free Bitrix24 or Bitrix24 clones?
I totally share your frustations with Basecamp. I published a rant about the similar issues in 2011 (but nothing has changed ever since): helge.at/2011/06/basecamp-sucks-basecamp-is-great-both-is-true-the-latter-more/
I just tried Teamwork (more out of curiosity than of real plans to migrate) and must say: I am absolutely blown away. Exactly how Basecamp should be (while, ok, ignoring the little featuritis Teamwork does indeed have). And pages load double as fast. Wow.
Now I am considering to move away our ~35 projects from Basecamp Classic.
Thanks! And greetings from neighboring Vienna.
Alec,
I really appreciate this post/review. : )
We are SUPER happy with teamwork.
I was frustrated and about to pull my hair out.
What I did was create my company. Then I put all of my developers in another company. Then all of my clients are in their own company.
Then I put the setting to only show contact info to my company (which consists of just me : ).
Clients and developers are working well together and our lead time on projects and development time have really dropped. I would estimate 20-30%.
Thanks for your post!! -James
Many of the issues outlined below have been fixed. Thank heavens or rather thank TeamworkPM.
Hi Helge,
I enjoyed your article and share most of your frustrations.
Still a year later with TeamworkPM, I really should write an article about why TPM isn’t all that it’s cracked out to be on paper.
Other than Basecamp (Classic or New), the other solid player in affordable project management is Asana. Asana is free for teams up to 15 with lots of limitations (you can’t have any private projects, everyone in your team is on every project). Even worse, the pricing get really nasty for larger organisations: we’d be at $550/month instead of $150/month. If we grew even a little bit, we’d be at $800/month on Asana instead of $150/month on Teamwork.
In retrospect, I think we would have been better off sticking to Basecamp Classic + Highrise or migrating to new Basecamp. The move was very, very painful. The Basecamp migrator doesn’t work all that well: we still don’t have our files and many old posts lost the identity of the original poster (Apollo has better migration). Our clients were pretty annoyed about giving up the old Basecamp interface.
From your complaints about Basecamp:
No Meta Data for To Do’s
Still none on TeamworkPM. You’d have to use your workaround. You do have the two edged sword of shared tasks which I banned in Foliovision (shared tasks are a sure forumulan for nothing getting done).
Drowning in Emails
Excess emails are even worse on TeamworkPM. “Notify All” is the default for most contexts. Afterwards it’s impossible to unsubscribe people from notifications (the interface is there but it doesn’t work: every time your client replies everyone is resubscribed).
I’ve given TeamworkPM some detailed notes on Observer Status which would allow team members to include someone in a conversation but who would otherwise be invisible to the client.
Weak Findability
Search is nominally a bit better but the results are almost opaque (you can’t tell anything about the results without opening them up in separate tabs). I’ve given TeamworkPM specific notes on how to fix each section of search results but they don’t give a toss. They are far more interested in playing around with ZenDesk integration or adding another incompatible javascript library than fixing something core like search.
Time Tracking is only almost great
Time tracking loses people’s hours if you remove them from your account or even from a project (see how happy your staff are not to be paid, see how happy you are not to be paid). We went from time tracking in Freshbooks to a single solution in TeamworkPM which improves efficiency but costs us a lot of nuisance with lost hours.
Unused Tabs
Yes, you can disable unused tabs and can even set up a standard configuration for new projects. Unfortunately one cannot disable the Files tab without disabling upload. We do NOT want clients uploading files to the Files tab but to Messages and Tasks. Good luck with that. Very frustrating.
You wrote:
Exactly the same issue applies to TeamworkPM.
Other items from your list: In fairness Dashboard and Contact Information are somewhat better, with starred projects and an everything view and a decent address book (that only really works well in Chrome though).
In addition to your list TeamworkPM is missing a basic Basecamp feature: Admin status. You have either Owner/Admins (access to ALL projects) or Users. On an individual project you can promote someone. We have over two hundred active projects. Managing your admins on a per project basis is just a stupid headache and gives us trouble almost every time (someone cannot do something which s/he should be able to do and requires owner intervention to escalate him/her to admin on that project).
So in the end, we are pretty miserable on TeamworkPM. It was better when TeamworkPM were still making an effort to fix bugs and help us out (they did add a custom CSS feature on our request) with usability. But at this point, Dan, Adrien and the rest of the team are so obsessed with (dubious)new features, there is virtually no quality assurance or concern for existing clients.
I’d look elsewhere or stay on Basecamp. It’s basic but at least it works and you don’t have the hassle of a move.
If you are looking for a better dashboard for Basecamp, you could try our Ascent List which allows you to manage tasks across all projects. We have a version for TeamworkPM which is in active beta as well (anyone who’d like to use can drop us a line via our contact form).
Hi Alec,
thanks for the update! You should maybe also update your original article – it comes up 3rd on “Basecamp vs Teamwork” on Google.
So we are definitely going to test Teamwork extensively before we make a decision. You have definitely curbed my initial enthusiasm – thanks for that!
I am not yet done testing through your list but I can’t confirm all your points from here:
I’ll look into the other issues (especially the lost hours – time tracking is crucial for us), thanks a lot for the pointers!
Greetings from Vienna, Helge
Hi Helge,
Just today ran into some new surprise annoyances with TeamworkPM: a client was unable to edit one of the Notebooks (frustrated client). Turns out I couldn’t either. Tried everything to make the Notebook editable but it resisted (I did restart the browser). What finally worked was duplicating the Notebook. After duplication both old and new copies worked and I was able to delete the new one. Still had an annoyed client on my hands who’d lost a bit of trust in our technology and had lost half an hour of a busy day.
Drowning in Emails
The other problem today was another client sent out a five bell alarm to all twelve members of the team on her account. This screenshots will explain why she might do this.
TeamworkPM default notifications: always everyone possible
It’s actually really painful to get in there and disable dozens of people one by one. Clients generally go with the default.
I have no way to stop the client from hammering twenty of us on every new communication apart from lecturing to the client which brought a world of grief onto my head. The designer who brought us the client was very unhappy that we didn’t “just fix our technology, instead of lecturing clients”. I’ve been talking to Daniel Mackey about observer status for secondary participants but he’s ignored it to focus on Zendesk integration, going as far to call excessive notifications a non-issue which do not concern any of their other clients. Good luck with stopping “drowning in emails”.
Contrast the mess above with the Basecamp notification dialogue which is open all the time and makes it a deliberate step to raise a five bell alarm.
clear basecamp notifications
Much better, even if not good enough (there’s still no observer status but that’s to be expected in a program with few features).
Browser Compatibility
It’s subtle, you won’t notice the issues until you are under fire with a large account.
If a company has scale, it’s actually cheaper to control one’s own storage and infrastructure. Amazon S3 is just trendy nonsense in the case of TeamworkPM. I much preferred both Basecamp’s SFTP to our own server or the clean URLs and properly named files on 37signals servers to downloads with names like this: =?UTF-8?B?MTItMjAxMyB2eXBsYXRuZSBwYXNreS5wZGY=?=.pdf
Metadata
Thanks for replying that I’d missed that. The rollover of creator and date is a nice feature. I can see why you’d like that and how it would whet your appetite for more.
Conclusion
I’m not sure how much worse off we are on TeamworkPM than on Basecamp but I’m no longer able to say that the pain of transition was worth it.
Feature-rich but buggy with a very quirky interface or feature-poor but reliable and well laid out…which is worse? In the end, I think I prefer fewer features but features which work.
Both 37signals and TeamworkPM are frustrating companies of which to be a customer. 37signals won’t add even a few features to add power while TeamworkPM are always adding new features but not finishing them properly and often implementing them just wrong enough to render them useless.
What TeamworkPM really needs is a three month feature freeze on extras like additional integrations, substituting an endless pot of gold behind the next rainbow mentality for solid work on core.
For many months I believed this work was coming. I sent TeamworkPM Foliovision shirts for their whole team, detailed notes on dozens of core bugs, congratulated them on the redesign. But no luck. Ever more bling while the roaches continue to have free reign on core.
Hi Helge,
A further update. If someone from your team has ever commented on a thread, you cannot (even as the account owner or an admin) remove him/her from that thread. The “Edit Subscribers” function will show the person gone but s/he will automatically be subscribed to every post unless the user (and what client is going to do that) specifically unsubscribes on every send.
Nor can I even find where to remove myself from a thread I don’t want to be on.
It’s this kind of inattention to detail which drives me batty with TeamworkPM.
Hi Helge,
Another update. TeamworkPM have read your and my concerns about drowning in email and have decided to do something about it.
A first big step has been made. Everyone possible is no longer default and not even available (the user has to go and choose all or some people).
TeamworkPM have also fixed the bug where it is impossible to unsubscribe people from messages (apparently: I haven’t tested this widely enough yet to confirm).
Right now TeamworkPM are discussing upgrading the currrent “no mail feature to the Observer status proposed above.
Instead of everyone seeing a little red x beside the name of the person who can’t receive email notifications, only the owner company will be able to see “observers” and bring them into the conversation.
Observer status will stop clients who have a small display issue or a small hosting issue from accidentally notifying all 25 people working behind the scenes (20 of whom might work on the project three times/year) of every little hiccup. At the same time owner companies will be able to add all the people they need to each project for quick access. Whenever an observer is assigned a task or added to a message discussion, the client will be able to see the observer and interact with him/her like a normal participant. But on any new message or task, the client will only see the five core staff (e.g. designer, programmer, project manager, CSS designer) who work regularly on their project.
The current workaround is atrocious. For alarmist or inattentive clients, we have to bring the people in their project down to skeleton crew of project manager and company director. At Foliovision, we are really excited to see TeamworkPM make the dream come true of a working tool for mid-sized company project management.
With hundreds of active clients, we can’t train all our clients to use project management properly. Nor should clients have to deal with an interface which requires them to learn how to work with us. Out of the box, clients should see the interface and the people they need to work efficiently with the service provider (in this case us).
Here’s where the option to exclude a team member from emails is located now:
In the future instead of a checkbox and “Let Ivana receive email notifications from this project”, there should be the following text:
Much better. When this improvement comes through, I will be able to recommend TeamworkPM as an improvement over Basecamp. Until observer status comes into place, my suggestion it’s not worth moving away from Basecamp. Recurring tasks is the principal substantial upgrade and notification issues remain a little bit worse than Basecamp.
Thank you for this review and updates, I was planning on moving my company to teamwork, but will check out Asana.
I think a company that has broken features should focus on fixing what is promised before creating new ones.
We are firmly committed to TeamworkPM Chris, so I sincerely Teamwork fix the lingering workflow issues
The very worst of the promiscuous emailing has been fixed with the elimination of “Notify Everyone” as the default. If TeamworkPM add the observer status for which we’ve been asking them for for nine months (currently there’s a very primitive implementation which simply puts a red X beside a team member’s name but which the client can see), we’ll feel much better.
For some reason, TeamworkPM don’t seem to think adding features which are not in competing products is a good idea. For the moment, they are followers and not leaders. Imagine if Apple took a similar attitude? Or even the early Microsoft.
If you have less than 15 people and don’t have plans to radically expand, you can’t lose with Asana. It’s free and looks great.
We looked at Asana but there is no time tracking, and the integrations with other packages were pretty clunky so was a deal breaker
Hi Bernie,
Thanks for your feedback from the field. In support of TeamworkPM, I can say they finally cleaned up the Freshbooks integration to make billing almost a pleasure.
If integrations exist, they should be done well. Like you, I’m tired of half baked software. Everything seems to be in permanent beta these days.
Asana: no time tracking is a bit of a deal breaker, it’s true. We really like having time tracking inside TeamworkPM. Having it all in one place saves us dozens if not hundreds of hours per month of staff time.
Hi Luca,
Are you sure you don’t work for proofhub? Their site quite amusing. Many have suggested that TeamworkPM is just a Basecamp derivative. Proofhub appears to be a TPM derivative (a reflection of a reflection of a shadow).
What I don’t like at all about Proofhub is that there is no address on the website and no team profiles. At least with both TPM or Basecamp, you are dealing with real people, even if the ones at Teamwork are friendlier than those at Basecamp.
Curiously Proofhub has a strange variant of the Observer status which I’m seeking in TPM called Casper. But Proofhub is all about keeping people anonymous (like their website). I’m much more interested in keeping clients from mass emailing my whole company but allowing the whole company to be able to help on most projects without adding and deleting people several times per year. What I did like was the built-in chat though.
I wouldn’t recommend Proofhub as a good alternative to Teamwork at this point.
Alec,
Thank you so much for this review and all the comments related to TPM. We are taking the leap and going all in. This will be our first PM system. We are a mid-sized ad agency and need a price friendly system with powerful features. Currently we are producing a few hundred projects a year, which will be growing soon. I’ll let you know how it goes in a few months.
Hi Evelyn,
Good luck with your new project management system! Having project management has been a boon to Foliovision (starting with Basecamp who helped us build the company and carrying on with TeamworkPM who offer a more sophisticated product).
With hundreds of projects open, you will be pushing the limits of both systems (Basecamp and TeamworkPM). I.e. at that scale both start to load a little more slowly in some areas and the interface is not as well set up to handle that much information.
The advantage here with TPM is that I do know they are working harder on optimising the system for the medium sized client and are making progress with scaling up. Some screens which in a large account would just not load before (thinking of People for instance) will now load in ten seconds or less.
Please let us know how it goes once you are all set up and running. Thanks!
PS. I’m hoping to be have some big good news from TeamworkPM about some new features for mid-size agencies very soon.
I have been using basecamp classic for several years. We have THOUSANDS (almost 4000) live projects. The only way we can work with it is to have multiple browser tabs open. I can walk to the moon quicker than I can get to the projects home page.
I cant switch to basecamp new because it does not support private messages in templates or even at all.
Hi Simon,
Thanks for the feedback. I hear you about New Basecamp: it’s really underfeatured. Yet, as you can see above, we have some ongoing issues with TeamworkPM, especially around email overload.
Still we have a huge account with hundreds of active projects and the account remains usable in all but a few views (Everything: Time can be very, very slow, Everything: People is faster than it was). I’d say usability remains good on large accounts.
The issue with migrating to TeamworkPM from Basecamp is that the migration path is not that smooth. If you have a budget for the migration, you might want to contact us as we could now migrate you with far fewer issues as the built-in TPM migration tools (which were quite buggy, though Dan gave us a lot of help with manual fixes – thanks Dan).
Thank you Alec and all for this, it is very helpfull. We are thinking about moving our workflow processes and projects into basecamp or teamworkPM, just didnt decide yet.
Basecamp looks a bit easier (less options) to use, companies have department options, which is handy, But communication in teamwork looks nicer and easier…
Does anyone know any NGOs that use these, to provide feedback? Pricing is quite ok, too.
I am also considerin on moving my family medicine group practice management into teamworkPM…
Id also like to know how Evelyn fared, and about those new features for agencies you mentioned?
Hi Mario,
Thanks for writing. At this point, I am happy to be able to recommend Teamwork again. Friendly pricing, time tracking and wide-ranging features remain, while many of the nagging issues which were really bothering me last winter have been cleared up.
I know that Teamwork management was not happy about the laundry list of grievances from Helga and me. It appears they’ve done their best to address most of our issues. I don’t know why Peter or Dan don’t drop by to add their direct feedback to this thread: it’s open to them as well.
But the best thing to do will be to go through all the issues again with an precise status update (including some screenshots) for those who are wondering.
Interface Consistency
Gradually comments on all parts of the site are being brought into line with each other, as well as options being found in the same place (top right). These are welcome improvements.
There seems to be a real effort going on with browser compatibility as both Chromium on Mac (v30 and v35) and Fluid 1.7.2 are both working better. Back buttons remain pretty unreliable which is an inconvenience. Sometimes the browser’s own History menu will work where back buttons will not. I’d like to see further effort here to respect the back button right out of the box, although I can live with the workarounds now.
We don’t care much about metadata for tasks and as you note it’s actually there in a good way in Teamwork (on mouseover). Somteimes, we would love to be able remove some current metadata like priority or progress via general preferences. Too many boxes to fill in. Unused boxes add psychological clutter. We have our own tool AscentList to assign priority in a natural way (rank your tasks: send us a note if you’d like early access).
On the other hand, we love recurring tasks (we have lots of them) and start dates are a great help to get future tasks out of the way now (while there is nothing that can be done about them).
Email Promiscuity
Teamwork has removed the “Send to Everyone” options and crazy defaults which were killing all of us with large teams and direct client contact. The situation is about 70% better.
There are now single click unsubscribe links at the bottom of emails which is a big help dealing with irate clients who want to get off of a thread (peculiarly though clients can’t get off a thread from within the application).
What’s a bit strange is Teamwork have gone the other way. If someone comments on a thread s/he is not necessarily added to the thread subscribers. Even less reliable is adding someone to recipients. You really have to go and add the person via Options –> Edit Subscribers. This should be more intuitive (commenting or adding someone to the thread should add him/her as a subscriber but s/he can then opt out manually again). The situation is better than it used to be.
It’s a pity but Teamwork still can’t get around to implementing Observer status despite agreed detailed specs. Peter and Dan continue to maintain an “it’s complicated” argument even though it’s all down in B&W.
In any case, we only need the observer status for is messages and comments (Messages are the only place almost all clients like to hang out) to make us happy. I guess we won’t be happy for a good long time as apparently departments have to come first. There’s always a good reason not to implement paradigm shifting ideas while adding more bulk to the application.
Findability/Search
Search has been substantially improved. There’s enough metadata for search to be useful on larger projects. Search by date is there even if it doesn’t work on Projects and/or Notebooks (which could really use date metadata).
TPM search options by date
Time Tracking
No longer loses people’s hours if you remove them from projects. Big help there! Thanks guys.
Unused Tabs
I’d love to see nagging issues like the Files tab fixed (i.e. allowing us to remove the Files tab but allow people to upload files to Messages and to Tasks where they belong.
Scalability
In answer to Evelyn’s comments on scale, TeamworkPM is much faster now and I’m finding it much easier to work on our large set of projects. In fairness, TeamworkPM sped up and I did a huge housecleaning archiving many inactive projects (I can always bring them back). We are running at very good speed with just under 150 projects live.
TeamworkPM should think seriously about scale as many of their clients will grow thanks to running their small scale operations well with project management. We simply outgrew Basecamp Classic.
Without Observer status over the last year, our agency had to scale down somewhat. The communication issues and workflow issues were bad enough that we couldn’t handle the workload and client training. How many times I had to write: “No, please don’t send every email to all twenty-five people on our team.” You really are at the mercy of your project management software. Choose carefully. Fortunately TeamworkPM has gotten a lot better in the last six months.
Other Big Improvements
Quick Time logging and project selectors. With a single click you have access to a quick logging window which is very nice: Quick Add –> Add Time. It would be nice if one didn’t need to face a dropdown for to get to it as I often use it multiple times in a row and going back for the dropdown is a nuisance, even an RTI risk as it’s an awkward mouse action. A second button Log and add more time would also work.
Teamwork project selector in time log
The new project selector is awesome and can be found through the application: just type a few letters and get the short list of projects you need. This project selector is throughout Teamwork now and makes quick work where normally one would be scrolling through huge lists. Speaking of which, it should be added to the search dialogue (which also needs a working back button).
Teamwork quickadd task with project selector
Application development is hard and Peter/Dan are two of the hardest working founders/developers out there. I still feel there are too many visible options for everyone and that some game changers haven’t been added (Observer status) in favour of some silly make-work projects. Selection of new targets is done largely by number of requests from outside. For the moment, Apple-like brilliance remains beyond Teamwork and we continue to get faster horses.
On a similar note, Teamwork has still not managed to match the earth-shattering simplicity of the Basecamp admin model. If someone is an admin on a project, s/he can create templates (although s/he can only use them in the projects to which the owners gives access or which s/he creates himself or herself). TeamworkPM requires us to make that admin an owner (which gives access to all projects: the madness of which has brought on the rush to Departments).
So while there are still annoyances with Teamwork, it’s about as solid a project management system as there is at any price. Absolute minimalism is a trend and people will probably tire of it eventually. Serious project management requires a lot under the hood. Teamwork offers enormous power and flexibility .
In terms of value nothing comes close. One would have to pay $50/seat monthly to get this kind of power in anything like a useable interface. Our Teamwork price per seat works out to about $3/month. We run project management, full company documentation (more on that in another post), internal CRM, time tracking, bug tracking, forum management (perhaps another post sometime) and billing (with a helping hand from Freshbooks at the end), all within Teamwork.
I think we use the product more than Teamwork does at this point as we even discourage any work within chat. Everything at Foliovision goes into Teamwork.
very interesting feedback on teamwork, I wonder if some people have moved from asana to teamwork or the other way around. My team is not that large and I am thinking asana seems like a more mature project, am I right ? is asana the rolls royce ? and teamwork a little cheaper and more up and coming ?
Hi Phil,
Thanks for your question. I’d say Teamwork is the more powerful system.
My reservations about Teamwork had a lot to do with speed and consistency in the user interface. Behind the scenes, there’s been quite a bit of interaction between Teamwork and our team to fix our largest annoyances. Happily most and the worst of them have been addressed.
Still the browser back button remains totally inconsistent on Safari 5.0.5 and Chromium 3x.x on Mac 10.6.8, the platform I can easily test. Teamwork insist the issues exist only on my browser and platform but others have told me the back button issues exist on other platforms and browsers. Strangely browser history usually works but it’s kind of reaching behind your neck to do up your collar.
URLs to specific comments on long threads refuse to resolve quite often due to the strange way TeamworkPM have implemented scrolling/incremental loading. This annoys our programmers more than me.
Most disappointingly, despite repeated promises to do so and detailed shared specs, Peter Coppinger has failed to implement Observer status which means clients can still hammer your whole team (up to 25 people in some cases) instead of their three or four designated contacts.
Again, this may sound negative to some people. It’s not. I’m in Teamwork about 12 hours/day managing a team of thirty more so I’m more sensitive to Teamwork issues than their own development team. If Teamwork was a bad solution I wouldn’t still be here.
On the positive side, the time logging and the export to Freshbooks are truly awesome and have allowed us to simplify our internal processes and even make our own billing both more flexible and more powerful. We’ve used the TeamworkPM API to work wonders.
You can bet that if Foliovision were in Asana I’d find lots and lots of issues there too, many of which would probably be unsolvable (why we left Basecamp, we would have had to code half the application ourselves, rather than the fifth of the application we coded for TeamworkPM). To start with Asana doesn’t have time tracking. The Harvest account Asana recommend for our thirty staff would cost us an extra $300/month out of the gate rather than the small Freshbooks account one can use with Teamwork’s built-in time tracking. If we didn’t already have the clients in Freshbooks and used to using it, we could even bill them directly from Teamwork (although for a larger organisation, using them in combination is more powerful).
Worse than the extra costs, using Asana would send us back to the nightmare of project management and time tracking separate. By keeping them together, you can get much more granular time records as there are automatic notes logged on most time (specific task) and your team is not juggling between two applications. It saves the owner/manager maintaining a parallel list of projects (you do need the list of clients in both applications but not projects) which is a huge time saver. Aesthetically, I also find the Asana user interface equally busy and boxy as Asana tries to grow up into a real project management solution.
So while TeamworkPM are a stubborn bunch of Irish (I can think of no good other reason why we are still waiting on Observer status), there’s not a better and more capable project management system out there (possibly outside of handrolled enterprisy solutions which would require an entire small IT staff to implement and maintain: even then I haven’t seen such a solution first hand, this ideal enterprise solution may be a unicorn). Basecamp Classic got the basics right. No one has extended Basecamp Classic to be as pure and perfect as the original. Of what is out there, TeamworkPM is the closest heir if not nearly as respectful of web standards (browser back buttons).
And no this is not a recommendation of Basecamp Classic except for a very small studio. The management capabilities (no recurring tasks for instance, no working search, limited permissions, weak time logging) are so weak, if your business flourishes you’ll end up seeking something more powerful. 37signals have promised there will be no further development of Basecamp Classic. And then you’ll have to deal with migration.
Thanks for the quick Reply Alec. I am step away from signing up to teamwork. Asana attract me mainly for the super rich documentation they have ready. Looks like a well funded project, but time tracking is on top of my priority list and and integrated time track is a must for me.
I assume a lot of your users are remote worker, have you entertained the idea of timedoctor ? The desktop screenshot capability may be a bit intrusive but these days…
As you manage many team members, most offsite I presume, I am very curious to hear your feedback about time tracking accuracy and how you make it work.
PS:I hope Teamwork will grab and run with all the invaluable feedback you can provide them with. You are the kind of client that can really make their app so much better. Seeing you stick with teamwork after identifying all these ‘problems’ you sounds like the kind of OCD person I want to follow ;)
Hi Phil,
Thanks for your questions. I’m not sure how much Teamwork appreciates our efforts but we do our best to persuade them to fix the really rough edges and in fairness to them, as well as the speed and user interface consistency improvements, our bugbear email promiscuity issue is so much better since the “Everyone” defaults were removed.
It would be nice if Teamwork added back resubscribing people who comment later but those are relative details. Teamwork does let us do all of our project management in a single place (actually we do use and like Freshdesk/ for managing help tickets for our products: Teamwork still gets all the services though).
To answer your question about remote workers and logging: no we don’t have a lot of remote workers. We opened up our large office in Bratislava as I’m a firm believer in synergy and physical contact. We even do team building and do large parties every once in a while. Physical contact improves performance and responsibility.
Productivity: we also run an important bonus system. Those who are very productive make large bonuses (up to 100% of base pay). Those who dilly dally make no bonus. If I suspect hours are dodgy, I’ll dock them (I’ve got a pretty good idea after all these years about how long any specific assignment should take). If someone persistently has weak productivity, we talk to them about speed (quality does come first). If it’s a persistent issue related to ability, we may lower the hourly rate for that person (so s/he can work at their best speed, maintain quality and still make bonuses). If it looks like dodgy hours, first I dock the hours with a warning. Next time it happens, that person can look for a new job, somewhere the controls are tighter. Some people have managed to trick me for three or four months.
The number of dishonest people is surprisingly small. Dishonesty is kind of like bacteria or litter: allowing some encourages more.
Still I’d be hesitant to introduce software like Time Doctor as first someone would have to monitor the logs (more hours) for it to be effective. Second it would make Foliovision seem like one of those big awful companies (Dell, IBM, HP, AT&T spring to mind) which are more like prisons than creative work places. Yet with expansion, our rulebook has had to grow much, much longer (we have no rules at Foliovision until someone on staff does something so wrong we have to add them: for three years, people could take whatever holidays they wanted until the young women (all friends) in the design department thought it would be super cool to all go off on a road trip for five weeks at the same time, leaving us with no design department for almost two months).
While we do have some remote writers, they are not on hourly but on per assignment. I’d recommend you put remote workers on task based pay as monitoring what they do will be next to impossible.
I hope this helps! Let me know when you come on board and join us on Teamwork. The best way to test project management is with some smaller internal projects of limited duration to see if you like the set up, before going through the effort of moving everything inside. I had a test Teamwork account for over a year before we finally moved houses.
Hey What about instant messaging ? HipChat seems to be the most serious around but no integration with teamwork.
Even with everybody working in the safe office, I think there is a space for Instant Messages, any tool you use ? Or you decided that Teamwork messages are good enough ?
Hi Phil!
Teamwork have talked about creating a chat client. We’d love chat fully integrated with TeamworkPM and be delighted to pay for it.
Unfortunately as planned, we’d never use TeamChat as it would not support standard chat protocols. I.e. it would work in the browser or with their custom apps but not with XMPP. As our whole company uses XMPP clients across a myriad of devices moving to a proprietary protocol would be a huge step backwards. We all appreciate being able to use a single chat client for all our different chat venues (apart from Skype which has been demoted six months ago for security and performance reasons: Microsoft never found software they couldn’t make worse apart from Excel).
Peter Coppinger tried hard to persuade me that I’d really like all the extra features and that backward compatibility is irrelevant. No way. XMPP for core with protocol extensions for extra features would be the intelligent way to go and would put us on board. Don’t take our money if you don’t want it.
First issue I can see with a proprietary protocol/app: some of our Linux versions wouldn’t be supported, our core Mac OS X 10.6.8 wouldn’t be supported and our old XP computers wouldn’t be supported (we have a wide variety of machines for different departments and to help ensure we don’t become platform dependent, remember we are coding for the open web).
In the meantime, TeamworkPM are huge HipChat users. You can see references to HipChat on their weblog.
Ironically at Foliovision we discourage chat, as it leaves huge amounts of information outside core project management: we are Teamwork all the way. Yes, you can move logs but that’s extra work. The way we use chat are short chats about being able to meet, quickie URLs. If a longer conversation happens we move it back to TeamworkPM immediately.
For the moment we maintain our own XMPP server based on open source OpenFire. Works a treat and we already have the infrastructure up. Now that HipChat is free (except for VideoConferencing and ScreenSharing) we think about moving over (previously it would have been another $1200/year of potential profit down the SAAS sewer).
Then we think about the Edward Snowden and the NSA and think we’d probably be better off leaving our main chat on our own server.
I hope the above helps you use TeamworkPM more effectively.
Those of you who have read this far might enjoy a more in-depth look at current TeamworkPM Message Subscription defaults.
If I seem very serious about this software, don’t forget I spend more time in TeamworkPM than almost anyone alive.
Have a great weekend!
You mention lack of American privacy laws/Snowden/NSA… Is TeamWork hosted in the US? I couldn’t find any information.
One thing I do like about TeamWork is that you can export a MySQL database of your entire project as a backup. But I haven’t seen any way to automate the backup. I’m surprised someone hasn’t reverse engineered an open source teamwork-like client based on the db file.
Hi Mike,
You’re right: the MySQL export gives a real sense of security. I’m worried that Peter and Dan might be thinking of removing this feature or it will quietly suffer attrition (“too difficult to maintain” even though it requires zero maintenance). Great to hear someone else is enthusiastic about it.
There’s no money in an open source client and endless tears. We thought about building Basecamp Classic level functionality on top of WordPress but had too much client work at that point. Really it was too big a project to bite off. The guys in Ireland are about ten working full time flat out so I’m not sure how someone would create something competitive in open source.
Security issues with a project management client would be one of the first concerns. If you are looking for capable free project management, Trello uses a different model but is great for task lists (much less awesome for client communication) and for open suggestion lists. Check out the Public Roadmap for iThemes Sync. We’ll probably do something similar for FV Player soon.
Alec,
Here’s a update on the transition to TeamWork. We just did it. Big leap and everyone seemed to catch on very quickly. We’ve added a PHP script to auto number our jobs. A little hiccup on the function. Job is added, then a comment is added that the job was edited. I know if may seem small, but the extra comments on the initial jobs adds up when you have 5-7 jobs opening a day. We put in a trouble ticket, they are aware of the problem, but no fixes as of yet. Probably not high on the list. We’re patient, we plan on being with TeamWork for a long time.
My favorite function so far is the LINK area. We have a lot of large files, that we would never place inside of TeamWork, so we just keep it on our ftp server and make links. The billing function is awesome too.
I don’t think we would have ever moved from our current system without this blog. So thank you! I’ll keep you posted on our progress. Keep up the great work!
Hi Evelyn,
Congratulations on your move. That’s a very innovative use of links.
Is there not a security risk when putting files on your own server unless you are restricting access to people logged into another system or unless you restrict download access to people with referrers from Teamwork on a custom domain.
I.e. unlike the files uploaded to Teamwork you have no control over download access. Let us know if you’ve got a good security workaround.
Alec,
We do have custom domains and restricted access in place. We have internal servers, virtual servers and a great IT guy that keeps the firewall software updated.
We want to add some more functions to the system, starting with the billing reports. We’re going to try some more custom scripts.
Thanks for all your input. It’s been very valuable. I’ll let you know how our scripts work out.
Hi Evelyn,
If you have that kind of infrastructure backing up your project management, adding TeamworkPM as the top layer sounds awesome.
I look forward to hearing more about how effectively you are able to leverage TeamworkPM. I still owe the world one on the billing. We are able to do great time logging and billing by combining Freshbooks and TeamworkPM, using just workflow.
We have time logging, daily reporting to project managers (custom script), tasks, message, core billing all running through Teamwork. Now if the guys in Ireland would just get around to some simple fixes like making comments on tasks and messages identical, we’d be in heaven.
PS. We still need Observer Status. Foliovision ended up shrinking partly due to the lack of Observer Status. We really needed Observer Status and instead had the pain of not having Observer Status and so had to change the profile of the company and shed lots of smaller clients and junior staff (as there was no way to manage them effectively without Observer Status). Funny how project management software can effect workflow and profitability and the whole face of a company.
A small word of warning about Teamwork’s word, Evelyn: we were promised the Observer Status and even drafted an interface with them which simply never arrived.
Alec,
Wow, amazing what you are doing with the billing! We hope to get it just right for our needs also. Yes, I agree with you on the messages and comments feature. Would be nice if they were identical.
I remember you taking about Observer Status. Sounds like an excellent feature. I can’t believe they dropped the ball like that. You practically did their job for them, and yet they still refused to add the feature. It’s a shame that you had to change your profile and so much was lost.
Word of warning taken. I may even write a script to fix the message issue we have, instead of waiting for them to get around to it. :)
I will touch base again in a few months to let you know how we’ve progressed. Thank you again for your knowledge base!
Hi there,
Great article. Although I’m wondering how you have an overview of what all staff are working on with TeamWorkPM? Moving from an Excel based system where I can see what everyone is doing this is my only difficulty with TeamWorkPM. Are there any tools you integrate with to allow you view what each person is specifically working on a daily basis?
Hi Marie,
For that you can use the built-in Everything bar and go through Time and Tasks there.
We built some custom tools which are available to the public (right now AscentList is not for sale and there are no plans to make it paid any time soon so you’ll be able to use at no cost for quite a while). Our AscentList includes project manager reports with daily mailings of hours worked in each project as well as the ability to go through prioritised task lists for each person you manage: you see in real time what that person is working on right now and what s/he should work on next.
http://ascentlist.com
Ascent List originally worked with Basecamp but the current version is all Teamwork. Let us know if AscentList helps you too. It’s what we use to make Teamwork really work for us.
Thanks for your reply. I’ve had a look but I’m not sure how to sign up using Teamword rather than Basecamp?
Hi Marie,
If you sign up for AscentList you will automatically get a Teamwork account now.
Thanks!
Hey Alec,
We are a small multisite organization that has been using Basecamp for several years and have been relatively satisfied, until recently. We use the Backpack portion of the suite and have found it to be a useful feature. The ‘online file cabinet’ allows us to access property information such as utility details etc. when out of our main office. Since 37 signals will no longer be supporting Backpack, do you have any recommendations for a stand alone product or does Teamwork have this feature? Thanks for your input.
Hi Cindy,
Thanks for your question.
There’s two great solutions here for the online file cabinet. We use both of them.
For very secure information, we put it into LastPass. We are using the paid Enterprise account and are very satisfied with the ROI. We even add important clients to our Enterprise account to allow us to better share secure logins with them to social media accounts. As LastPass is US domiciled, there are some security concerns but short of giving up all US cloud solutions (Google, Apple, Microsoft) no worse than any other. Teamwork itself is rather foolishly hosted on Amazon servers (I wish the guys in Ireland wake up and put our data on European based dedicated servers: you’d improve performance, increase security and save money) so your data is vulnerable to American snooping and discovery.
On the very positive side with Teamwork in terms of online filing cabinet: what we’ve done for the Backpack type shared wiki/knowledge base is create separate Docs projects for each department where we share the knowledge primarily in Notebooks (which alllows them to be kept current but also to track changes). This is a very powerful tip on how to reduce login load (no need for a separate wiki).
Search on TeamworkPM, while not perfect, is much better than on Basecamp so you can actually search those Doc projects and get the exact Notebook. Only those with authorisation to those projects will be able to access them. Like a Wiki but a lot easier to use with more attractive presentation of information and revisions.
Ironically Teamwork does not use Teamwork for documentation as we do (Teamwork is used internally by Teamwork for project management: they also use a lot of chat which we discourage as it leaves ephemera and scatters knowledge). I really like minimising the logins though: it makes larger teams much more productive.
I hope this helps Cindy!
Alec,
Thank you for the thorough review of Teamwork. Your feedback was very helpful during our evaluation process. I switched my agency to Teamwork after 5 years with Basecamp primarily because we needed integrated time tracking. The time tracking in Teamwork works very well, but the surprise has been how much we prefer Teamwork across the board. It is an exceptional product that allows our team to work much more efficiently.
You have have made several references to a future post on how Foliovision uses Teamwork and Freshbooks to bill your clients. I am very interested in learning more about that workflow, as we are planning to move our billing to Freshbooks as well. I’ve done some testing, and while Teamwork invoices get pushed to Freshbooks as expected, the biggest problem I’ve found is that the task descriptions we’ve entered in Teamwork don’t show up on our Freshbooks invoices in a particularly elegant way. I’m curious how you ovecome this issue, so I hope you will find the time to write that post soon! :)
HI Brandon,
Thanks for your request for the Teamwork/Freshbook article. You’ve pushed it up to the top of my writing list (especially as I have a lot of end of year and start of year billing now).
I agree with you 100% on how descriptions get pushed over to Freshbooks. I’d prefer not to have the Task or Person in the Task Field. I’d like to see the Project there (some invoices have multiple projects) and then in the Time Entry Notes) and then have the Task, the Time Entry Notes AND the person in Time Entry Notes section as Freshbooks does it natively.
There is a real consistency issue, but it’s partly to do with how Freshbooks set up its fields. I’ll try to add some examples from old Freshbooks time tracking as it was definitely less confusing.
Even person under Task would be fine, but then it should ALWAYS be person. In that case Task and Time Entry Notes would go together in Time Entry Notes. Consistency is the problem.
Alec, Firstly, let me send you a heartfelt thank you for your exceptional and methodical maintenance of this article; you, sir, have improved the internets.
If time allows, could you possibly:
Love the work you guys do at FV, and thanks again for this page! -m
Hi Marcuzzi,
So Marcuzi, for a small agency, Teamwork is perfect.
I’m glad the info above helped you.
Hi Alec, thanks for this very informative review and for keeping up with the thread for so long! We are considering Teamwork for our small/mid-size marketing agency. It seems like a great app but there are a few shortcomings I’ve noticed that I was wondering if you’d come across/found a workaround for (or perhaps they’re not applicable to you):
(FYI I am a Traffic Manager so I am primary concerned with time!)
-Task time estimations don’t link to start/end dates. For example, if I assign a task that starts on Mon and is due on Fri and I estimated it will take 25 hours total, I’d expect the time to be evenly distributed over the 5 days, so 5 hours per day. However it seems to just dump it all in the first day, skewing that person’s schedule and capacity. That means I have to create separate tasks for each day to get an accurate view of how much someone has on each day – which is time consuming and makes the gant chart overcomplicated.
-The workload view only shows the total hours per user — not what makes up those hours. So if someone has been scheduled 20 hours in one day, I have to resort by project and go back and note what projects they are on and mentally recalculate the total to figure out what I need to reschedule to bring it down to an achievable number.
-On a similar note, there doesn’t seem to be a quick capacity view in which I could see how busy someone is on a particular week and what jobs they have on – either I can see a total hours figure in the workload view or I can go into the calendar where I have to hover over each day/project to see what’s there (which doesn’t have the time estimations!)
-There doesn’t seem to be a way to account for other things taking up someone’s time, i.e. meetings, annual leave, part-time staff, etc. The only workaround I can think of is to create a ‘project’ for ‘admin’ for example and block out the time that way so you don’t overbook someone. (Would be great if there was a 2 way calendar sync!)
-There aren’t status options for tasks or projects. Unless everyone is logging their time live (which many don’t!) you have no way of knowing if something is progressing or not. There is the progress bar but that requires manually updating which seems a bit laborious. This is a major drawback as it means I can’t see at a glance what’s to-do/being done/held up for some reason.
-There’s no way to associate a rate with a task or person. This is also pretty essential so we can keep track of how much a job is costing compared to our estimated costs.
Any thoughts would be appreciated! Thanks!
Hi Alyssa,
Thanks for your long thoughtful post about using Teamwork at scale.
I’ll start with the end of your list.
Your first four concerns: serious time tracking and time blocking. Teamwork doesn’t play at this level, sadly. The way we use it is to assume a certain amount of intelligence and sobriety in our staff: i.e. if someone is overloaded, s/he should come to me/team leader and let us know about the issue.
This assumption has not always worked and we’ve ended up with some very annoyed and overworked staff members. For awhile we even had some banjo pickers who were able to hide in the woods and not do much. Fortunately our interviewing process gets rid of most of those and the rest I catch in a monthly review of all hours.
I’ll say it again (no doubt it will annoy Peter and Dan to see it again in print, but it’s the bitter truth). Almost half the reason I had to cut Foliovision down to half its peak size were the limitations in Teamwork when working at scale.
I.e. in simple terms, we had to leave Basecamp to be able to bump it up a notch with great features like recurring tasks and scheduled tasks.
Teamwork’s email promiscuity and issues even loading screens when you have enough hours in (I still can’t print out a monthly hours report without standing on my end while reciting Buddhist prayers) made it impossible for Foliovision to carry on at a larger scale. Simple issues like the absent global rate for a single staff member have caused us all kinds of pain. While any of these issues one can overcome, the overall effect
I tried to work closely with Peter and Dan on Observer Status but a year and a half later despite my urgent pleas, including long telephone calls, interface diagrams, Observer Status is still unimplemented although at the top of the Roadmap (no, not any more, it’s been demoted to number seven. There’s been all kinds of time for every silly kind of integration though instead of the core improvements larger teams need.
We’ve climbed three quarters of the hill with our AscentList which offers many of the time management solutions and much of the reporting you require via the (excellent) Teamwork API. Unfortunately due to how the limitations of Teamwork wounded the development of our service, we were unable to keep the full programming team and are stalled on it (it should be full free beta right now). Anyone who’d like to partner on developing a Teamwork solution (a bit of funds and some marketing muscle for it) should contact me.
So the conclusions here for you Alyssa are as follows:
Foliovision is very comfortable on Teamwork with thirty very active projects (another seventy lay fallow with hundreds retired/archived) and twenty active core staff with lots more field workers who are not on the clock. We were miserable and ineffective at fifty core staff. Without hiding senior staff we couldn’t have them occasionally help out without being dinged every time by clients who were cross not to get the lead expert every time. As noted above, managing rates was a nightmare. Running timesheet reports was nearly impossible (still very difficult).
(1) Again in fairness Dan did implement a blockquote feature which saved my workflow and also did add custom CSS for enterprise which helped with those time sheets – and the guys are largely cordial to deal with which is a good first step).
Alec,
Alyssa is having the same problems we are having with traffic issues. So our AE’s have decided to move away from TeamWork and migrate towards Clients and Profits (not my favorite), but it was the most cost effective for our growing agency and the account team liked the traffic features. It was a good year run with Teamwork, but the struggle with reports, traffic and time management has soured our accounts team.
Teamwork has so much potential. I’d like to think Peter and Dan would work with you in the future to implement your ideas and take it to the next level. If they decide to add in a time tracking/blocking feature, like some of their competitors do, they’ll be unstoppable.
Yes, Alec, thank you for keeping up with this feed for so long. It has been an asset! I will continue to follow this feed, and hope that one day Teamwork takes that next big step in the development process and you can get back on track with Foliovision.
Hi Evelyn and Alyssa,
It’s great to know we aren’t alone in struggling with scale issue in Teamwork. I’ll check out Clients and Profits.
We are unlikely to move any time soon as:
I too hope Peter and Dan will think more about growing customers. Good project management allows a company to scale up. It’s a pity when we must outgrow our project management software along the way.
Something I’d love to see in Teamwork would be more global preferences which would allow me to turn off features across the site. A specific example is Billable/Non-billable. Our team is not trained to decide what is billable and not billable. We deal with billable/not billable on the invoice (deleting the not billable hours there or assigning credit for them if we want the client to see them).
It’s a billing nightmare for me to go through each client’s time report (an extra step) and make sure that no billable hours have been marked wrong. Of course I could just tell everyone (been there, done that) not to ever use not billable. But in that case we just don’t want the feature there to confuse and complicate the interface. There’s lots of opportunities to declutter the Teamwork interface by removing unused features.
We do this on our own FV Player video software for WordPress. It means everyone gets just the features s/he needs instead of all the features all the time. Here’s how the global interface options look there:
I hope Teamwork get around to allowing us to reduce interface clutter with a similar set of options which are global and not just per project.
While we are wishing upon a star, a working back button in Teamwork would make my work days shorter and happier. I’ve reported the broken back button (both Chromium 30 and Safari 5.0.5) maintes fois. Not sure why it’s essential to break core browser functionality but it appears to be a terminal vice.
Hello Alec et al,
Since Alyssa and Evelyn were commenting about moving to a more comprehensive solution, I thought I would also leave an update(Alec, I did receive your response, way back when, thank you very much).
During our evaluation of PM software, two things became very clear:
I just had issues with running my company, and Teamwork not having all the tools I needed, reporting aside (such as accounting and billing). So in my mind, I had progressed from managing projects to managing our company better.
Enter PSA (Professional Services Automation) software. I tested quite a few: Clarizen, Workamajig, WorkETC, Clients and Profits, AffinityLive, Bitrix24, Odoo (amazing stuff, just a bit new), FunctionPoint, FunctionFox and BlueCamroo and a few others.
In the end, we choose AffinityLive. At ~$70 USD per user, it was nuts-o expensive, but alas they all are.
However, when I compare how easily I quote and bill (each quote is an actual project. When accepted, it flips into project mode, and people start timers) and how easy it is to track ALL time, even creating emails, it has been a blessing.
Proceed with caution, however. You may NEVER find another project manager as robust as Teamwork. While it is missing a few key items, it is by FAR the most amazing PM tool I have ever seen.
What I mean is this: You will undoubtedly loose a lot of attractive PM features moving to a PSA. In the end, however, what I needed most was a way to track costs, timelines and hours more than collaboration tools. If I did want super project management, I would eventually try to use a PSA along with TW, maybe.
With all that said, there were a few reasons we ruled out some of the PSA providers: high set-up costs, no cloud hosting options, too complex.
If I had the staff and size, I would go to Workamajig. They truly seem enterprise level.
I didn’t like Clients and Profits, I don’t remember why: some business requirement that I can’t recall nor could be bothered to overcome. I liked WorkETC and loved BlueCamroo, but they were either too expensive at the time, and BlueCamroo is more focused on tech that I needed.
I also loved, loved, loved FunctionPoint. But I already had AffinityLive so I didn’t see a reason to switch (BlueCamroo and FunctionPoint are fellow Canadians, so I love promoting them).
Lastly, please keep this in mind: CURRENTLY almost ALL PSA-s are desk-based and are desperately adapting their methods to the Android/iOS realities of the world. What I mean is don’t expect that you will have much functionality beyond basic timers on your phones. (However, I think Alec does not really have this issue.)
My immediate starting point for any serious company are the following: Clarizen, BlueCamroo, FunctionPoint, AffinityLive.
Is paying USD $70 per month a TON of money? You bet. Is it worth it? For me, so far, it has been. We have placed everything in one system: I create trouble tickets, leads, tasks, projects, sign-offs, everything in one place. Track all hours, minutes and seconds. Auto tally at end of month. The neat thing is, I now also have my retainers in the system, too. So now, a client that pays for 10 hours a month, gets billed and the balance is either rolled over to the next month, or not. My choice. (Picture the look on my client’s face when I told them that last month they had 2 hours unused, and we were going to revamp all their banners for Valentines’ day, no extra cost.)
So, expenses went up, billings went up, client happiness is up.
I hope this (long-winded) email has helped, thanks again, Alec, for this forum.
Cheers, M
Nice to hear from you again, Marcuzi. Thank you for sharing your experience on the high end/enterprise level. I haven’t explored that segment seriously yet (too busy running our current business) nor did I want to be tempted.
What’s held me back is pricing. At our largest we would have had fifty people who needed staff level accounts (many of them were part time). That would have been $3500/month which is about the price tag of a skilled programmer around here.
I’m strongly against per user pricing models as I wrote above. It leads to an environment of exclusion. I far prefer a per project model and normally book out (whether with 37signals or Teamwork) in the top tier.
It’s strange that Teamwork won’t really listen to those of us who have managed to grow our businesses, partly thanks to their good efforts. In the end, humanity is strange and this is just one small symptom.
Hopefully your input, along with that of Alyssa and Evelyn and my own will persuade Teamwork or someone else to push beyond fancy message boards with task lists with more advanced but optional robust project management tools.
Just today I was unable to output January’s full hours for my accountant in anything like an attractive and readable format. It’s a 369 page PDF in horizontal view to cover 1,313 hours and 17 minutes. Output used to fail completely when we had 3000+ hours month.
Hi all, Great to hear all your feedback (I can’t emphasize enough how nice it is to hear from real people with practical experience using these systems, rather than all the suspicious ‘reviews’ online)!
It’s interesting to hear that Evelyn’s company ended up moving away from Teamwork due to the lack of traffic features. I admit I am very concerned at this stage as to whether or not Teamwork will be the right solution for us because of this. It’s really frustrating because it seems like such a great system aside from this — if they even just did some some tweaks so that you could at least see a summary of projects with the estimated hours per person, that would be a HUGE help.
Marcuzi, thanks for your feedback on PSAs. I have looked at quite a few of those also, including AffinityLive which was also my top choice of those (FunctionPoint looks promising too but annoyingly they don’t have a demo you can trial – also liked Streamtime but a software-based option just is a no go for us) – however similar to Alec, I find it hard to justify the cost. They have what I need in terms of resource management but with a lot of other features we don’t necessarily need, and it would be a hard sell to my manager moving over to something that would is literally 10x more expensive… (Though if it truly increases efficiency then it can be worthwhile of course- just not sure if it would be worth it in our case.)
A system that I implemented previously which worked well for traffic management was Timefox (Functionfox) – it’s got all the functionality I need in terms of assessing capacity and pushing work through and I’ve used it successfully across different organizations/teams. Unfortunately the interface isn’t great – every year that passes it feels worse! – (and is really bad next to Teamwork) and isn’t as great on the project management side (though it’s something they’re looking to develop…), so I’m not sure if it’s the right fit where I’m at now. At the moment though, it’s probably my Plan B.
First plan is we are going to try and see if we can build an add-on app through Teamwork’s API that might give a bit more insight into capacity — if we can do this then I think it’s the best all-rounder.
Will let you know how we get on. Would love to hear any other thoughts!
I just ran into the missing Observer Status issue yet again. We’ve completed some pretty big projects lately (we’re smaller but work hard to stay even sharper). These projects have now gone into maintenance mode.
In every case, Observer Status would have avoided the false alarms and interruptions. The client would only be able to notify the right two or three people. Instead we have to remind/browbeat the client not to do it. I’m supposed to be running a busy agency here, not providing kindergarten level instructions to our clients for an issue which could easily be sorted on the software side.
I wish Peter and Dan would pay attention to what we are saying. I wish Peter and Dan would keep their promises.
If you are running a small agency Teamwork is enough. If you are running large groups of techies, Teamwork may work. For a large agency with a large client base, Teamwork in its current state is simply not suitable software. If you are planning to grow your agency, profit from my experience and plan for the growth when choosing your tools.
Hey Alec,
I spent a good two hours reading through the comments here last night and your (and others) comments are all extremely helpful – great insights into your problems/irritations which mirror my thoughts largely.
I would be interested in how people are using Teamwork to solve the Traffic Manager headache. We have ~50-100 projects live at any point in time with typically low amounts of time each month, the problem is huge when something comes in and everything else needs to give way for a day or two and moving tasks up and down the todo list becomes a huge and in my opinion impractical job.
We love Teamwork for collaboration, it’s great but a resource management tool it is not (IMO) and it also doesn’t do any kind of forecasting/accounting on projects (such as answering the question: “Is this project profitable?”).
Currently we are using the following tech but would love to get this all in one place rather than need to have to login to separate systems to do tasks such as time tracking and resource management which should be so closely tied:
I guess if you boil it down it comes down to a few specific questions a project manager/management team has/has to answer for his/her team:
We haven’t yet found anything that does all of the above but still excels at Project Management.
Thanks again!
Will
Hi Will,
You could drop Harvest and use Teamwork for all time tracking. The time tracking in Teamwork is pretty good actually (time tracking is one of the aspects of Teamwork I love: we were able to drop hybrid Basecamp/Freshdesk for Teamwork with only invoices going out from Freshdesk mainly as the database was there along with automated payment).
We are also keen to drop Google from our workflow but do need Google spreadsheets (no one has created inexpensive and effective online spreadsheets as competing with free is no fun, on the other hand handing over to the NSA every client spreadsheet is hardly good data practice).
Ironically we have looked hard at trying Resource Guru but maintaining yet another database of our team would cost us more in resources than it would save us.
Our AscentList (currently close to new signups) solves many of the rush issues along with generating daily or weekly reports of resource usage (configured to each project manager). I’ll spare you the tale of woe (missing Observer Status killed our ability to scale). Our main server admin has been ill most of the time since New Year so we haven’t been able to open AscentList back up but plan to do so soon.
The joy of AscentList is that it uses exactly the same database as Teamwork so you don’t have any data double entry.
Your questions:
What are my team working on today?
AscentList covers this by person and in daily emailed reports. You can get a facsimile of this out of Teamwork directly by demanding real time time logging and running time reports in real time and a day behind. It’s in Everything –> Time.
Are any projects unprofitable and why?
You need project managers at this point to monitor total hours. This is trickier than you think as not only do you need to know hours you need to know how far advanced the project is. Automated methods could show five of seven tasks are done with only two thirds of hours but the last two tasks could in fact take more time than the previous five sending you to unprofitability.
AscentList does give you daily emails to your project managers to see quickly any big use of hours and to zoom in on them fast.
What forecasted resource do we have? Are any projects falling behind?
Same issues as above. You can ask for estimates for individual tasks and tally them up (using again the excellent API). At some point it becomes a question of just how much time is spent managing time (having your team estimate every activity means they are spending a lot of time estimating).
Has work been complete?
Project Start and Project End dates are a very useful tool built straight into Teamwork. They help us make sure we complete on time. We’ve moved to charging $100/month for any project which stays open beyond 60 days (if the delay has anything to do with us of course we are very flexible). Completing work is more a company value. We’ve worked closely with our team to make sure everybody understand how important finishing work properly and on time is.
I do a monthly work done review (the report failed more often than not when we were over 3000 hours) by project (you can find this in Everything –> Time –> By Project with last month’s date) for billing. While I’m doing this I’m on the lookout for individual unfinished projects.
I hope all the above helps you to project management nirvana. Alas until we get Observer Status, Foliovision cannot scale. We are hostages to our project management software, despite our best efforts. If we could fix participant visibility ourselves, we would. If anyone knows of a project management solution which handles team visibility well, please let us know.
Hi Will, Alyssa, Marcuzi, Evelyn, Brandon and Everyone who has contributed to this discussion!
I have wonderful news for us all. Observer Status has landed and it’s awesome. For those of us running client facing businesses, with mid-sized to larger teams, I’d say it’s life changing. We should be able to almost double productivity and even triple our profitability (financial analysis in the post).
The above analysis is more about how Observer Status can help an agency. I’ll be posting a detailed technical post on how to use Observer Status hands-on tomorrow.
If you are in a rush to try Observer Status here’s the starting points.
You can see people’s status in a project’s Overview (Observers are grouped separately: client doesn’t see observer list). i.e. yourcompany.teamwork.com/projects/sampleproject/projectpermissions
You can see people’s status in a project’s People page (in green, next to his/her title). i.e. yourcompany.teamwork.com/projects/sampleproject/overview
You can manage your team’s Observer Status in People page via Options i.e. yourcompany.teamwork.com/projects/sampleproject/projectpermissions
Observer Status Options
Hello Alec!
This is great news! A long time coming, but at last, you have it.
Recently I had posted that we switching over to Clients and Profits. After a discussion with the development team about features we would like implemented, we’ve decided to stay on, as they have assured us they will work on these features in the upcoming future. We’re willing to wait it out.
Looking forward to hearing how this feature will work for other users. I’m going to try it out this week and reap the benefits, I’m sure.
Thanks again Alec, for the continued activity on this feed. Very much appreciated!
Firstly, thank you everyone for contributing to this thread, it has been very informative, especially as we are using very similar systems at the moment. We are a relatively small business, but wanted to get the project management and accounting right from the start, so after about a year of research and testing out numerous crm’s and PM tools, we settled on Teamwork and Freshbooks. My partner loves Teamwork and does not want to switch, however, as I am managing the sales cycle and account management, I am in desperate need of a crm tool. I’ve recently started using capsule and love the simplicity of it, however I am keen to implement an all in one solution.
Ben Habeck – I was wondering if you ever implemented your Teamwork CRM ‘hack’ and how that worked for you, or if you ended up using something else? Is Teamwork likely to bring out some tweaks that will enable a simple CRM anytime soon? Even tags on a company level might just do it. Thank everyone!
Hi Melinda,
Thanks for sharing your questions. I’m very sorry to only answer them today. We wanted to do some more testing of Teamwork Desk before answering.
We continue to use CapsuleCRM for our CRM. Frankly we’re pretty happy to have the noise of CRM out of project management.
What has ENORMOUSLY helped our workflow is the arrival of Teamwork Desk (full review coming). We’ve put all our shared mailboxes into that system, brought the whole team over (with the otherwise useful Freshdesk we had to limit the number of team members who had access for budget reasons at $18/month minimum per agent).
In Teamwork Desk we are trading info back and forth among the team with internal notes and moving a correspondence among the whole team. There are triggers to route all the mail to the right person and notify him/her. It’s lightning fast (albeit first load of framework is slow). Much faster than Freshbooks for managing large numbers of tickets.
Teamwork Desk has saved us the burden of moving a lot of correspondence into tasks in Teamwork Projects.
You could probably get by with Teamwork Desk as the CRM aspect of Teamwork in a light usage scenario. You won’t have the workflow tools but you will have contact information and notes as well as a history of correspondence.
Here’s what the contact info fields look like (click for lightbox):
Basic but neat and simple. The history view is delightfully straightforward as well.
The history covers only email but for other contact you could easily use the built in notes function.
Complex history gets folds nicely so it’s easy to browse back through history on complex issues.
What’s missing for CRM
What you are missing are budget tools and workflow tracks for a typical sales cycle. You are also missing tasks but linked tasks are directly available from Teamwork Projects so missing task is not such an issue. Just create a sales project and drop them there. You can even have prepped standard task lists ready waiting in that sales project to be duplicated and applied to a new prospect.
In short a sales process driven company or department would not be happy with Teamwork Desk as a pseudo-CRM, but you just might be.
We’ve got a lot of history in CapsuleCRM and like it a lot but we’ll consider our own suggestion. CapsuleCRM is also per-user fees which we just don’t like as it means many people are locked out of useful tools they would only use a few times/month.
I hope the above helps you Melinda in your quest for the Grail CRM! Otherwise I agree with your selection of Freshbooks to manage your billing. Freshbooks is a great billing tool. For efficiency, track your hours in Teamwork though closer to the project and the tasks.
I’ve used Basecamp for about 2 years now. As mentioned by most, I liked the simple look and easy adoption for user skills ranging from advanced to basic.
Initially, it worked great, but I found it impossible to effectively manage within 6 months. I’ve open/completed about 300 projects with average of 30-40 open at any given time.
I quickly found that Basecamp wasn’t a “true” project management tool, but a great communication or collaboration tool. The main issue I had with Basecamp, being a PM and someone who is a contributor, is it can become impossible to see/catch every new post or file – especially since I don’t have any control of forcing a notification. The “phantom posts” got me in hot water more than once.
Basecamp has little to no reporting capability and that is essential with projects. Even when I tried using the various plug-in reporting apps and gantt chart apps, I was doing endless hours of review and reporting.
I’m in my first week of Teamwork (client facing) and I’m loving the reporting, summaries, gantt charts, and how much control over what each user can do. This is critical since we have quick turn around development projects that can easily have 10-40 clients per project not including my team.
I don’t hold anything against Basecamp, but I wouldn’t classify it as a “project management” application. I classify it as a “collaboration tool”.
The only warning I would give someone who is evaluating what application to use is, make sure you are using Basecamp within the bounds of its intended purpose. If you don’t, plan on working many late nights recovering a client due to a missed post, a missed file, or simply trying to track dozens of posts. This is intensified if you have a client who uncontrollably adds/closes/moves/changes to-do items. Also watch out for thread crossing. I have endless examples of threads regarding “task a” ending up being on “task c” – there is no control over continuity or correcting posts once they’ve been added to the wrong thread.
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for your insightful post on the limitations of Basecamp for project management. Basecamp really seems to be set up for a situation where you have about a dozen or two projects with a team of about ten. After that, as you point out, there are just no tools to manage the bigger picture.
In Teamwork, there’s a tool which you might like which is the the bell in the top right corner which will show you ALL the action on all of your Teamwork projects. I’ve given up on keeping up, my current total is 44K (which explains why). But it can certainly be a help with a difficult client or a more moderate sized account (we have something over a hundred active projects, with hundreds of retired projects).
It’s also easy to move tasks between lists or projects, as it is with messages. The tricky part is separating out mixed communication. That needs to be done by hand with the out of place message deleted or redacted. As most of the time mixed communication is within a single message, it’s actually not that easy to automate. I’d still like the option to break a comment out into it’s own message with a single click.
On a slightly different topic…I’ve promised some information about Teamwork Desk and Teamwork Chat, the latest members of the teamwork PM family.
While we’ve enjoyed Teamwork Desk (has its own issues, such as no proper page titles to differentiate between windows and/or history states; slow loading), Teamwork Chat has been awful. It requires almost a whole processor to itself. It’s the most inefficient application on any of our computers. Teamwork Chat behaves almost as badly in the browser, crippling Chromium by taking most of a processor there too. We begged Teamwork to create a lightweight XMPP proxy (with half or a third of the features, we don’t need much out of chat other than IM). Typing is very slow and the whole feel is glacial. Chat should be snappy and light (otherwise chat becomes more just a clumsy additional email channel).
The issue appears to be related to the underlying technology which is Ireland’s Intercom.io which is ridiculous overkill for something which should be as simple as chat.
Obvious question: why don’t we just use another chat service? The merits of single sign-on just outweigh the downsides of Teamwork Chat and Intercom.io. Keeping entirely chat separate means more IT busy work which we are working relentlessly to minimise inside Foliovision.
Hi @Alec,
Your blog and comments are an exceptional resource. I wish I got in on this convo on the ground floor, as with you and @Ben – I’m truly looking for a simple way to integrate a CRM with TeamworkPM. For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to find a way to get TeamworkDesk to be our CRM, but thus far to no avail. Have you thought of using a service like Zapier to link in Slack for your chat or Highrise? The Linking through Zap isn’t always the best, but they show on their site they can produce 100% compatibility.
Hi Sam,
I’m glad my experiences and those of the other contributors to this thread have helped you. I’ve learned a lot here both writing and reading.
Could you explain in more detail what you are trying to accomplish in your CRM to help me give you some advice on what additional service you need and how to keep CRM simple. We continue to find Teamwork Desk and CapsuleCRM to be a good combination (although it would really help if there was a default BCC option for all outbound mail).
I’ve always been disappointed with Zapier links. Zapier doesn’t link intelligently for the most part/ I’ve spent hours trying to tie CapsuleCRM, TeamworkPM and Freshbooks together for creating new clients and new invoices and never managed to get a system which was an improvement over doing it manually. It’s not possible to keep the three databases in sync using Zapier – one way information is no great help to me, although it might work for some people.
BTW, some great improvements to Teamwork Desk this week. There were some issues with both search speed and inclusivity (search was slow and didn’t include body). Sorting was unreliable. Now search is fast and accurate and sorting is lightning quick. Beefing up search (we’ve asked for Google style and/or operators using Google conventions of +/-) makes Teamwork Desk a much better help solution. Search is so important for both email and a help desk. At its core a help desk is a shared email client, the rest is just bells and whistles.
We are prepared to enthusiastically recommend Teamwork Desk at this point.
On the other hand, Teamwork Chat continues to be the worst application with which I have nearly daily contact. We’ve almost stopped using chat as we loathe Teamwork Chat that much in Foliovision. I’m anti-chat (keep it in project management please, team) so I guess we’ll continue to live with this crippleware. If you have another chat solution, even if you are using Teamwork Projects don’t move your chat over though unless you want to put a stop to chat. And slow everyone’s computers in your office in the process.
Let me know about your CRM needs when you can.
Hi Alec, thank you for this great thread. I found it today and thankfully appreciate your engagement to share your experiences in this way
We’re a small agency, handling an average of 50 parallel projects, and hostages of a CRM called Daylite since over 10 years, as it seems to be the only combination of project management and crm with a great email integration. Means, every single email, we send or get is linkable in a comfortable way, not just to contacts, also companies, to projects, opportunities, tasks and events. All this very easy with a Apple Mail plugin.
BUT! Daylite is at first not a web app, and it is not offering any state of the art concepts of task handling, like Kanban, Gannt, or at least task comments. So, years ago, we decided to find some better solutions, especially for task handling and time tracking. But no single solution seems to have a chance to catch all this email traffic, we constantly have with our clients. So, we stayed with Daylite and set an additional project tool for a better task handling on top. We started with Redbooth formerly Teambox, switched to Wrike and are now at Breeze.
As I did many research over the years for a better tool, I have now a great list of almost every popular tool in project management and CRM, but still no final solution. I was looking at Teamwork Projects from time to time since years as they could be a great combination of project management and crm functions, but it is still just a project management.
I know, there are some integrated solutions at the market, but most times they lack wether in complexity, expensive user model, or other important but missing things. Anyway, i found no single solution, which is able to connect outbound and inbound mail traffic with nearly that elegance and power, as Daylite. I tried already some integrations, the most are using bcc forwarding, many are focussing at gmail, or outlock, what is not our thing. Anyway this integrations are most time just linking this emails to a crm contact, thats it. And also they have a poor html mail and attachment handling.
Focussing on your experiences, can you tell me, how you are getting your email stuff for projects and CRM needs done? As you’re using capsule, what seems to have just a email dropbox, I suppose, you should have linked your crm mail traffic just to contacts? What is with all that other project related mails. Did you eliminate this for all, while bringing them all to Teamwork projects?
Hey Alec,
after two years of hesitation (due to the pain to have all customers migrate their accounts) we finally made the move to Teamwork. And it feels great.
Basecamp 3 was a glimpse of hope but after closer inspection isn’t so great – the “client side” concept of Basecamp 3 doesn’t match our processes at all.
Thanks for the initial help here, two years ago! Very useful article still.
Hi Harald,
Sorry for the slow answer. 1. Your question is a very complex one 2. I was three weeks away in Canada to see family this summer.
CRM and project management are two different families of products.
There’s actually a whole family of related products. I’ll start from the bottom (i.e. beginning of a relationship) to the top of the process and outline which products we use.
We use Teamwork Projects to manage any project which is more than just a few emails (i.e. we graduate helpdesk special features to Teamwork Projects very quickly). Project management is so much better with messages and task lists than email/helpdesk for anything more than simple help requests. We’ve tried both ways.
Going back to your dilemma with Daylite, it’s not easy.
What I would like to use is a combination of:
Unfortunately all of those problems are complex ones to solve. Any product which takes all of those issues on are either a hopeless primitive mess (Odoo) or impossibly complex and expensive (Hubspot, Salesforce, Infusionsoft; both run by people who want to bleed your business dry with high charges in every direction, particularly any customisation/integration; SharpSpring is still a stiff hit but at approx. $2000 to get onboard and $400/month flat for unlimited users, still in the running).
It would be great if Teamwork developer a CRM which would unify Teamwork Desk and Teamwork Projects. They are probably secretly working on such a product. I don’t expect much of the first three iterations of a Teamwork CRM after experiencing the total hash Teamwork have made of chat (btw, Teamwork Chat is the very worst chat application I’ve ever used. IRC is better, XMPP in any flavour is better, HipChat is fabulous. We are using RocketChat now and are delighted by its speed and flexibility.
So one is left with picking the major blocks:
A few other considerations:
I hope this helps!