WebWorkerDaily spoke to Chan to find out what’s worked for him and what hasn’t, so other companies can crib from his answers and avoid the school of hard knocks.

Talent

Chan’s first move into web work was to hire a virtual assistant, Marina. She is from the Philippines and eventually came to work directly for ADP, becoming a baseline for the company in the country and helping them hire more people. Having such a linchpin is key, according to Chan.

“If you have one really solid person who you trust in country, whether you know them personally or they come through a reference, that can make or break your whole virtual team,” he says. “I think it’s really been because of Marina that we’ve been able to succeed in working in the Philippines. The same is true now in India. We have one lead person and it’s because of our relationship with him that we can manage the India team without us falling apart.”

An adequate hiring process is also essential. “We hire based on the resume, the portfolio they show us online, and an interview process where my lead person in the Philippines interviews them first and my partner and I do subsequent interviews. Finally we give them a test at the end of the whole process to make sure they can do what they say they can do.” But it wasn’t always that way. Previously, the company simply hired off a resume and a single interview, “but then we found these people were not performing, leaving, slacking off, so that’s when we put in the other procedures.” Problem solved.

Tools

At first, “it was hard for us to figure out how to manage virtual workers properly,” Chan confesses, “but now we’ve put a number of tools in place so we can monitor their hours and then match the hours with the productivity.”

To do so the company uses a range of off-the-shelf, paid-for cloud services. Chan explains: “Basecamp manages all our projects. We use Yammer, a corporate Twitter-like product. As soon as a team member finishes a particular task in Basecamp they have to ‘Yammer’ it. Then we use Skype for one-on-one discussions. We use GoToMeeting for training purposes. We also use SlimTimer to track how much time is actually spent on a particular task. One last tool people might consider using is called RingCentral. Here in the U.S. I have an 800 number for our company and I can parcel out extensions to anyone I want, including people in the Philippines and soon in India.”

Tips

Leave little up to interpretation is Chan’s first tip. He suggests having “a very discreet process for  the tasks you want workers to complete. You can’t be ‘loosey goosey’ on your requirements – it doesn’t work. If it’s left up to interpretation, most of the time it will fail.”

Close collaboration is also important. Chan and his partner meet the entire team virtually every day at one o’clock. “The team we have in the Philippines works California time. That’s a requirement, which is the graveyard shift for them. So we meet every day come rain or come shine and we go through all our projects and everyone gives updates.” This is part of a concerted effort to keep the team cohesive, which also involves giving the team leader in the Philippines resources for team-building meals and drinks on a regular basis. And Chan has also invested in a few face-to-face meetings: “we have visited the Philippines once to get the team all together and we recently flew to Singapore and flew one of the team members there to meet us.”

Finally, Chan advises close attention to avoiding cultural miscues, at least at first. “When I started working with these teams, I was very cautious about what I said, how I said it, being polite. I’m less worried about what I say now because we have built a relationship up. But I think it’s very important that you understand the cultures that you’re dealing with and cultivate that. Then over time you can loosen up,” he says.

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

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1. Square pegs in round holes. Let’s face it: Not everyone is cut out to be a virtual worker. Not everyone has the personality to work completely alone, apart from the team, nor has the ability to be focused and motivated to do work without the looming presence of a manager over one’s shoulder. Beyond personality types, not everyone has the ability to set up an environment away from the office that is conducive to work. It takes a special type of person and set of skills to navigate sketchy work environments (from distracting households to noisy coffee shops) and still be a consistent contributor to a virtual team.

What to do? Look for self-starters and team members who either have had virtual work experience and done well in that format or are flexible, focused and organized.

2. Lack of a clear process. A successful virtual team relies on a defined vision for desired outcomes and a careful breakdown of how it can accomplish those goals. In some ways, virtual work processes may need to be more rigid than those for co-located teams, with specific systems in place to cover time tracking, milestones, check-ins and knowledge sharing. But at the same time, the process must be flexible enough to accommodate the varied work styles of virtual workers. Ask yourself: Is it more important that work be done on a very specific schedule at a certain time of day or just that it is done on time? Because virtual teams can be dispersed across time zones, there can be distinct advantages to making use  of the asynchronous workflow rather than forcing someone overseas to be up in the wee hours of the morning just to be “at work” at the same time as the rest of the team.

What to do? Map out your workflow and communications processes and be specific about what is set in stone versus what is flexible. Make sure you have the systems in place to capture important data and that let you track workflow, deadlines and output.

3. Weak training techniques. If you’re running a team, you know the importance of “on-boarding” new team members. If you’re embarking on a virtual work process, getting everyone on the same page about how you want the team to work together and how to use the systems you’ve deployed is key. Without a clear explanation and properly conducted training, team output is guaranteed to be inconsistent at best. Because virtual team members don’t have the kind of contact one gets  in an office environment, making sure they have access to effective training materials and have the opportunity to ask questions as needed is important to the success of the team. One weak link can spoil the whole bunch.

What to do? After carefully thinking through your process, develop strong training materials and utilize one of the many tools that work well for knowledge sharing amongst virtual teams such as Mindflash, Knoodle and GoToMeeting. Make these materials available even after the training for reference. Keep lines of communication open for subsequent queries.

4. Failure to capture knowledge. In an office space, you can more readily ferret out the data you need, but in a virtual team environment, the bread crumb trail to data may be more convoluted or harder to track. And even in an office space, knowledge can be dispersed and kept in silos. Multiply that potential ten-fold in a virtual work space. The tools you use to capture information from the team can be helpful, but knowledge sharing starts with having the right attitude.

What to do? Emphasize the importance of knowledge sharing to team members and make sure you provide specific tools and steps to properly capture information from individuals. Everyone on your team must understand the critical nature of documenting and archiving in a shared space, and some helpful virtual work spaces include Glasscubes or Basecamp.

5. No glue to keep it all together. A good virtual team starts with a good leader. Whomever is managing the team needs to have a good grip on the dynamics of virtual work. Whether creating or communicating the vision, the team leader must be able to do so effectively, using tools such as Cohuman and Mavenlink to further a more cohesive team and work process. The team leader must be vigilant, organized and nimble, ready to address issues and fill in gaps to ensure consistent output with an emphasis on documentation and shared knowledge. Without a good leader acting as the glue to holding disparate parts together, communications meltdowns will be the norm, not the exception.

What to do? Find — or be — a smart virtual leader. Know when to be firm and when to be flexible, and be comfortable with being flexible. Keep both the big picture and the detail in mind and use the best technology and tools at your disposal to enhance your ability to do both.

Overall, a successful virtual team includes well-equipped, prepared team members who possess the right personalities and skill sets to understand the process, are on-boarded thoughtfully, and have tools to track work and share knowledge. And someone at the helm who can properly engineer and oil the machine.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user clix

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The Costs of Operating Software

Obviously, your team members have to have computers that run the software you plan on using. But those needs differ dramatically. In order to use web-based software, your team members need to have machines capable of running a web browser; not really out of the question for most people’s home machines. More complex software packages can require more powerful computers.

Depending on the type of software you choose, you may also need some additional hardware for your enterprise. Server costs are not insignificant and must be factored in. You may also find that with more hardware, or even software that must be installed on each team member’s computer, your organization will need a more extensive IT team.

The Costs of Team Size

While some web-based applications allow you to add unlimited users, it’s generally the case that the more team members you’re working with, the more you wind up paying. Even with “unlimited” users, the odds are good that as you add more team members, you’re adding projects, files or whatever items the app charges for.

On the other hand, you’ll need to have more software licenses available if you are installing project management software on your team members’ computers. However, certain solutions — such as a self-hosted web application — can help to avoid those costs. A larger team size, in turn, can get you reduced rates for the software that you use, but can also add to the costs in other ways: training, maintenance and upgrades can all make for pricey considerations.

Running the Numbers

Without running the numbers carefully, there’s no way to tell whether one collaboration solution or another will be better for a particular organization. Whatever you do, don’t assume that software based in the cloud is automatically cheaper to use: a monthly subscription fee can be incredibly deceptive and your business can wind up spending a lot more than you might expect. Dig deeper into those numbers before making your decision one way or the other.

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37signals’ tools are very popular choices, but I also received several responses from startups that started out using Basecamp, but made the decision to switch to something else. I think that indicates that a lot of people are pretty familiar with Basecamp already, so in this list I’ll share three less-commonly used tools that different startups have chosen to use to collaborate, and the reasons why they use them:

1. Redmine. Startup Gloto uses Redmine. VP Technology Tony Jacobs says, “The basic requirement is to make sure that each product, customer project, and internal project is tracked separately. The wiki (despite being a fairly weak implementation) is good enough to hold the stuff we need to see, and it will track documents and files in addition to wiki-formatted input. The related bug tracker is essentially a wiki for each bug as well, allowing richer links. We added [G]it as [an] SCM tool (in addition to our subversion repository), and Redmine integrates with both nicely. The key things that we looked for during the review is that the tool is actively maintained, reasonably stable, supports easy backup/restore operations (MySQL dump is the preferred method) and is easy to use. Having the tool look good was important too, because we expose this interface to our customers on occasion, and we always want to present a good face.”
2. Producteev. SubMate co-founder Jonathan Benoudiz says, “At SubMate, we love Producteev because it’s really easy to master and provides a seamless workflow integration with the “Email-to-task” and the instant messenger integration (we use Gtalk  a lot). We all have iPhones and it’s pretty cool to be able to check how everything is going on at the office with the iPhone app when on the go. Sometimes when I commute, I have 15 minutes to spare and just have to launch the app and identify a quick task that I can complete from my iPhone. We are a young startup that grew from two to five in two months. With Producteev, we can just add new team members and told them to browse completed tasks to be more familiar with how the product evolved.”
3. ScrumWorks. Unicast Director of Product Michael Tuminello says, “We use [ScrumWorks] with in-house and remote teams and have found it to be very effective. A web-based drag-and-drop UI lets individual team members take on daily tasks and track hours against them. On the product management/design side (where I am), a desktop client lets you enter, estimate and prioritize individual backlog items (work items). You can pull reports to see how the team is progressing against the project timeline, and it all ends up in a database. Our VP of engineering has been able to write custom code to pull the data and look at it in Excel pivot tables for additional information outside the scope of ScrumWorks itself, like helping to determine the relative ROI of individual features.The Java client can be a bit kludgy, but overall it’s a very effective program, and Danube is very responsive to feedback.”

What collaboration tools do you use in your startup?
Photo by Flickr user Stephen Cummings, licensed under CC 2.0

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Getting Your Information Out Again

One question that’ss easy to forget about when shopping around for software is how easily you can pull your information out of a given application. Whether you may want to move to a new tool, your existing tool’s developers stop supporting it or you simply want to be able to back up your data, being able to export data is a crucial consideration.

The presence of an API in a tool is not a guarantee that there is an easy export option, but it tends to be a good indicator. Furthermore, an API means that if you need to hack together an export tool of your own, it’s typically doable — you won’t find your business or organization in a problematic situation. It may require bringing in some expert help to create the tool, but that’s still going to be less expensive than having someone retype an entire database in another application.

Robust and Growing Tools

APIs create opportunities for development beyond what an application’s creators may be able — or willing — to do on their own. For example, Basecamp is a good project management tool, but 37signals has very carefully considered what features to add; it hasn’t chosen to add every suggested feature. But there is an API for the web-based application that lets anyone create the features that they need. If you browse through just the add-ons Basecamp links to, you’ll be there for a while.

You can find a wide variety of tools that add on to Basecamp right now. On a less well-known application, you may not have immediate access to add-ons, but you will still have the option of creating your own (or hiring a programmer to build a tool that makes use of the API) fairly quickly.

This sort of robust development is a good sign for the long-term support of a tool, as well. When users have invested in a tool to the point that they’ve created a plugin or a helper tool, they’re far less likely to switch away, which in turn means that the creators have more incentive to continue supporting the tool and even to integrate plugins in the future.

Looking for an API when choosing tools simply makes sense for a growing enterprise. It should be just as important a consideration as the price or features of the tools you are considering.

Is an API on your shopping list?

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Flowr’s home screen looks very Twitter-like. But in addition to status updates, users can create several other types of posts, including ideas, questions, events, to-do list items, and polls. Flowr also allows posting of larger documents (complete with links and images) that can be edited, wiki-style, by anyone who the original poster gives access to. One can mention others using the Twitter-style @ syntax, and files and tags can be attached to each type of post.

Each of the above post types can be shown in one main screen, called “My Flow,” or can be viewed by category, so that, for example, all of the to-dos can be viewed together.

Flowr also includes groups, which are rather like a cross between a private BBS and LinkedIn’s Groups. Users can create and join groups related to specific topics. Group discussions can be public or private (invitation-only).

Flowr’s people directory links to user-editable profiles that show contact information. The directory is searchable by such fields as expertise and language skills, which I can see will be very useful in larger organizations. As in Twitter, one can follow the posts of selected users.

Flowr has several tools that allow it to integrate with your workflow, including an iPhone app, a bookmarklet for saving and sharing web content, and a system for posting via email (like Posterous). Updates from Flowr can be shown on the desktop via the Yip extension for Firefox. Interestingly, though, Flowr doesn’t include an instant messaging function.

In addition, Flowr is planning integration with Google Apps, which is scheduled to become available next week. And Flowr has an API so that developers can create custom applications using the app.

The free version of Flowr supports up to 10 users and two groups. Flowr is currently rolling out a premium version with unlimited groups, custom themes and analytics, that will be priced on a per-user basis.

Flowr isn’t Basecamp-style project management, but it may be just the thing for organizations whose members like to interact via social networks.

Have you tried Flowr?

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If you’re moving to a web-based project management tool from MS Project, which one of the many available do you choose? Here are some considerations to take into account:

• Microsoft Project compatibility. The first thing is to ensure that you choose a web tool that is compatible with Microsoft Project so that you can use your existing project data.
• Multiple views into project data. In my experience, the Gantt chart can seem intimidating to some team members. As such, I recommend looking for a web-based project management tool that has a wide selection of views into project status (like calendar-, task- and timeline-based views), besides the venerable Gantt chart.
• Flexible subscriptions. One of the limitations of Microsoft Project can be the expense of the licenses. Many web-based project management tools like LiquidPlanner and Zoho Projects work on a subscription model, which offer a level of flexibility you just can’t find with traditional desktop software licensing. Project teams can scale up and scale down their subscription as members join and leave the team. If you rely on contractors and freelancers, you can set them up with a subscription and close it out when their project work is complete.
• Social media component. With social media becoming a growing element of project team communications, it should be an integral feature in web-based project management tools. I recommend looking for a web-based tool that has social media components to augment team communication about project status and scheduling matters. Developing an internal dialog about project scheduling and status is one of the best ways to keep the project on track.
• Online document storage and collaboration. Today’s projects generate a lot of project artifacts and documents. While it can be easy to let your project team stash documents in their email inboxes and local hard drives, choosing a web-based project management tool with its own document storage and collaboration features means that project artifacts can be accessed easily and won’t get lost.
• Mobile client/accessibility. Considering a web-based project management tool that has mobile accessibility or even its own mobile client means you and your team can stay in touch with the project at all times.

What are your requirements for a web-based project management tool?

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This could place even organizations with well developed telecommuting programs in a challenging position, because a major virus outbreak may mean that their remote worker needs exceed their current capacity.

On the flip side, there are organizations that are far from telecommuting-friendly, which face even more challenges because they aren’t set up for remote working. In order to keep their business running in such a crisis they are going to need to buy or build an infrastructure to meet a new model of working.

At WebWorkerDaily, we get a chance to review some of the best office productivity, social media, online collaboration, project management, and Web 2.0 tools that in a worst case scenario — like a pandemic outbreak — can help an organization maintain some semblance of operations and communications, even though its employees and contractors are working from home during the crisis.

Perhaps your organization already has a well-honed telecommuting policy, however it is prudent to look for chinks in your telecommuting plans before the worst case scenario happens. Here is a look at some tools and services you can use to keep business operations running.

Office Suites
While Microsoft Office is probably your corporate standard, an extreme scenario like a pandemic outbreak could place your newly minted web workers on their home PCs or on a limited number of organization owned notebook PCs — there might not be enough Office licenses to cope with this scenario. This means you may need to consider web office solutions to make up the shortfall. Good choices include:

• Google Apps is a good choice for augmenting your corporate standard Office suite, even though it is not as feature-rich. There are fee-based and free versions available.

• Zoho Business is another ready solution, with a wider variety of applications that Google Apps.

• Simon and I recently covered the impending rollout of  Office Web Apps. While it isn’t available yet, the model it promises is ideal for a scenario like this, because it can offer users remote access to their important Microsoft Office files with a familiar interface.

Web office suites can help you keep your work accessible online, which is especially handy if all your workers don’t have remote access to your corporate network.

Social Media
Whether or not your organization has embraced social media behind the firewall, suddenly becoming a home-based organization means that employees are largely cut off from each other. Social networking tools can help them stay in touch with each other and the organization as a whole.

Some corporate-grade social media tools that might fit the bill include:

• Socialtext, a corporate social networking and collaboration tool that we’ve covered previously.
• Yammer, a Twitter clone, is another option for injecting social media into your organizational communications (see our previous coverage).

Each solution has fee-based and free versions.

Project Management

Putting your project management tools online is a prudent move, even before a crisis — but it could become a necessity in light of maintaining corporate operations in the midst of an H1N1 outbreak. However, Microsoft Project maintains its crown as the most popular — albeit mostly desktop-bound — corporate project management solution. Here are some good online project management tools:

• Basecamp is a the most well-known of all of the online PM tools  — we’ve written about it many times previously.
• Zoho Projects is an economical and innovative project management solution that Doriano previously covered for WWD.
• Charles reviewed Team Effect which garnered some mixed comments but is worthy a trial.
• PBWorks (formerly PBWiki) is another online project management option and according to Simon’s review it is definitely worth considering

Each of these solutions have fee-based and free versions.

Instant Messaging
Keeping your team in touch with each other even if they are all stuck at home is vital. If your organization isn’t already using instant messaging, then you need to consider it as part of your contingency plan.

Some instant messaging solutions you should consider include:

• Open source clients like Pidgin and Adium which let you encrypt chat sessions over commercial IM networks including AIM, GTalk, Windows Live, and Yahoo.
• Microsoft Office Communications Server also offers web-based access to its IM client. If your organization is running it, take steps to ensure your staff has access to it from home.

Web Conferencing & Collaboration
Today’s web conferencing and collaboration tools are ideal for keeping your team working together even though they’re not all working from the same office. Here are some options for web conferencing:

• Acrobat.com includes ConnectNow. Thursday covered Acrobat.com coming out of beta. It has free and fee-based versions and includes online collaboration features.
• Dimdim, which we’ve covered before, is an excellent low-cost teleconferencing tool
• Simon covered the beta launch of Team Apart, a free online collaboration tool that offers white board, video conferencing, and file sharing. Depending on the progress of the beta, it might be worth considering.

Crises and Web Working
Whether you are building out or just augmenting your communications infrastructure in light of the H1N1 threat, I recommend checking out these  applications now and not on the eve of a crisis. You should also make sure that employees know how to use these applications and how to access them well in advance of having to actually implement your crisis plan..

How is your organization preparing to continue operations during an H1N1 virus outbreak?

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Like many similar products, upon login, users are taken to a dashboard where they can see an overview of activity for projects with which they are associated. The “Comments and Messages” area is laid out in a Twitter-like fashion, and users can see more detail, or respond, by clicking an existing message. Oddly, it appears that one needs to go to a different screen to compose a new message.

Other features, such as schedules and tasks, should be appealing to those who prefer visual representations of project plans. Schedules can be changed by dragging the bars in the Gantt-style calendars (which Team Effect has implemented without Flash, thankfully). Team Effect includes some sophisticated reports that web workers should find useful, such as project status and schedules.

The documentation is OK, as far as it goes, but appears to be incomplete. I wasn’t able to find information on whether the product notifies users of changes by email, or whether it has any tools such as RSS feeds that would keep people up-to-date without logging into the web site constantly. Additionally, the web site times out after a fairly short period of inactivity. The system does allow you to export some data to Excel, and this ability is apparently being expanded.

Team Effect is priced depending on the number of users you need. It offers a 30-day free trial, after which the basic package is $15 per month for five users. Other packages are available, all at the same rate of $3 per login per month. For most packages, the fee is only charged if a user actually logs in. All packages include unlimited projects and storage. Team Effect also offers discounts or free service to nonprofit organizations.

Team Effect will appeal to those who like visual representations of their workflow. But people working on projects that change frequently may find logging into the Team Effect web site several times a day to be a hassle.

Have you used Team Effect? How do you manage projects?

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The dashboard has details of all your current projects. Every project consists of messages (discussion forum), lists (tasks), pages (wiki), people (contacts on the project) and chat. In less than 10 minutes, I created two projects and added content for each.

Teambox feels easier and more intuitive than Basecamp. Not once did I need to peek at the help file or the Textile (text formatting) reference; the tips on the page were enough. Even after using Basecamp for a while, I still needed to look up its Textile reference.

Basecamp’s interface is nicer than Teambox’s, though; it’s sleeker and more eye-pleasing, with a dash of color. By contrast, Teambox’s interface contains little color and it doesn’t look the same in all browsers. For example, it uses a serif font in Google Chrome, making it a harder read than the sans-serif font displayed in Firefox. The project dashboard formatting could stand some improvement, too.

Web workers, especially those working solo, might prefer Teambox just because it’s free. You can freely create a project for every client and add those clients to the projects. However, if you need to build a complete extranet, complete with branding (which you have to pay for with Teambox), Basecamp is still the collaboration tool of choice. Furthermore, Basecamp has been around longer and has third party apps that work it. I’m sure Teambox will add new features as it develops a following and continues to grow.

You need to determine your own needs and chose the applications that best meets those needs. For a freelancer like me, Teambox fits my bill if I need to collaborate and manage projects with clients.

What team collaboration app do you use?

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Zoho has released a major update to Zoho Projects, its online project management system that allows you to share projects with your team via the web. Zoho Projects 2.0 could be a tempting service for small- to medium-sized organizations that cannot afford Microsoft Project, the “gold standard” for project management in the enterprise. Zoho Projects requires no special software, just a browser and an Internet connection.

Several plans are available, including a free account that enables you to manage one project. That free account has unlimited users, which is a great way to get your feet wet. Create an account, invite all your team members, and give Zoho Projects a test drive before splashing out on one of the beefier plans. The good news is that you can now also import Microsoft Project files, which means you don’t have to recreate everything from scratch for an active project.

Features

There are many new features for Zoho Projects 2.0, such as a revamped and less-cluttered dashboard and a Twitter-like user status update service that lets people involved in a project know what everyone is doing. There are also wikis and live group chatting, which give team members the ability to communicate online in real time.

A useful feature is a centralized file-sharing system for storing project documentation with folders, tagging, search and versioning. Files can be Microsoft Office documents or Zoho Office documents, which is now integrated with Zoho Projects.

The Timesheet feature allows you to log and track time spent by individuals or groups on specific tasks. Zoho has also integrated Zoho Invoice, which can assist with creating and tracking invoices for the project.

Zoho Projects vs. Basecamp

The biggest competitor for Zoho Projects isn’t Microsoft Project, but actually 37Signals’ popular Basecamp project management system. Some will prefer the slicker user interface of Basecamp over Zoho’s simplistic UI, while others will prefer the much lower cost for Zoho plans. For example, it’s $149/month for a Basecamp unlimited projects plan compared with $80/month for Zoho Projects. However, it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison because Basecamp offers 50 GB of file storage vs. Zoho’s 25 GB.

Both services offer free plans for one project with unlimited users, but Zoho’s free plan includes many more bells and whistles such as SSL support, 100 MB file storage, time tracking and more. However, you can try any of Basecamp’s plans for 30 days with all of its features enabled.

As for performance, both solutions are perky over a DSL connection. The true test will be accessing a massive project with a large amount of users hitting it at the same time. Which one will scale better? If you take into consideration the client base for each solution, then Basecamp will probably have the edge.

Each service provides the basics for project management such as milestones, to-do lists, live chat, file sharing/management, time management, calendaring, Gantt Charts and wikis. Zoho does provide the unique option to integrate documents from its Zoho office suites of applications, including Zoho Invoice.

Conclusion

If your organization is looking for a quick and easy and affordable solution for implementing an online project management system that works with an online office suite of applications, then Zoho Projects could be just what you’re looking for. The only way to know for sure is to get your hands dirty and try it out. Take advantage of the free account for one project, let your team members kick the tires for a while and compare notes.

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This isn’t the first time I’ve considered upgrading my LinkedIn account and decided against it, which led me to start thinking about all of the “freemium” apps — basically free apps with premium upgrades — I’ve been using. I started feeling guilty about taking advantage of the “free” in freemium services, especially because I’ve had the opportunity to interview founders of these companies, many of whom confess to struggling over pricing.  So what makes us decide to pay for an app?

My decision process works something like this:

1. Is it mission critical? Not every app or tool I use is critical to the well-being of my company, but some are. Our project management system? Critical. Our internal social networking system? Not so critical, because we’ve not all adopted it yet, but this could change.

2. How useful is the free version? In my WWD review, I was impressed that Deskaway‘s free version had more features than Basecamp‘s. That could have won me over, but its interface just didn’t work for me.

3. Can I live without more functionality? I used Basecamp for quite a while without ever thinking about the reporting available with a paid plan. I was getting my reports from Freshbooks, and Basecamp was just a way for me to manage client information when I was working solo. I only upgraded to the $24 per month plan when I needed to manage more projects. Payment made sense because I had so much more new work to cover the expense.

4. Should I upgrade and pay or seek out a different app? Once I began adding more team members to my company, Basecamp’s inadequacies for deeper project management became obvious. So instead of upgrading a notch or two further — and still not having the functionality we needed — we moved over to 5pm at $4/month more. Again, the cost was palatable because more team members meant greater productivity and more moving parts to manage, so it made good business sense.

5. Do the fee levels hit my sweet spot? I realize I have two tiers of apps that I am willing to pay for, each with its own sweet spot in terms of pricing. For apps that benefit the overall smooth functioning of my business and provide real value that I can quantify, I’ll pay around $25 per month. I feel comfortable having four of these. The second tier contains apps that are useful in some aspect of my work, and I’ll subscribe to up to five of these at $10 per month. That’s about my limit. Right now, I don’t have a real method for deciding how much I will pay — it’s all from the gut. But we’re working to measure the costs of doing business and the impact our apps have on our bottom line, so eventually I should have some real numbers to work with.

6. How entrenched am I? In some cases, I begin to feel “trapped” by the choice I made initially when I started with an app. If I need to upgrade and the next level is out of my price range, what then? When I left Basecamp, I couldn’t easily figure out how to migrate information over to 5pm, so I just downgraded my membership to a free plan, and now cannot figure out how to access my data so it just sits there. Over time, those assets will be outdated and no longer as valuable as they were the first months of the migration, but I still feel a sense of my data being trapped. Avoiding this trapped feeling — as well as avoiding a huge learning curve of a new app — are two big factors when deciding whether to move to another service.

7. Can I afford not to pay? If an app I’m using has a positive effect on my business’ bottom line–or moving away from it has a significant negative impact–then I’m much more likely to dish out the cash.

Back to the case of LinkedIn. The lowest monthly upgrade is $24.95. Per month. For me, that hits a sour note. I get so much benefit out of LinkedIn at the free level and have for years that there is no incentive for me to pay. Just missing out on that Quick Poll feature isn’t enough to entice me over to a paid plan.

All LinkedIn could do right now to win my paying business — possibly — is to remove the free level altogether. But by doing that, their entire business foundation would crumble as many people migrate quickly away.

How do you decide whether an app is worth paying for? Which services do you consider well worth paying for?

Image by stock.xchng user jana_koll

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Then there are the enterprise level apps that give me a headache to even look at because they cram a gazillion features and functionality into their interface. Or the apps that have robust features that I can’t find or figure out how to use.

Task2Gather is a pretty straightforward application for managing tasks plus it has an iPhone app which in my book is always a plus. On their site, they define their app as:

“…a free online service for task and project management that organizes your personal, family, social and business lives by keeping all your commitments in one place.”

I have mixed feelings about an app that organizes every aspect of your life although I know my whole like – not just my work – needs it. Still, when I see “organizes your family” on the same app that is supposed to organize my business functions in an efficient and cost-effective way, I get a little wary. But maybe this is the way organizational tools are moving – apps to take care of every aspect of your life because ultimately, they really are inter-related.

In order to get a good feel for Task2Gather, I asked my project manager Marla to test out the tool and give her assessment. Right now we are using Basecamp. I’ve sung the praises of Basecamp before, but these days the number of projects we are managing and the complexity of those projects – each with different combinations of team members involved – is making it harder to keep track of everything.

Marla, in her ever efficient way (thank goodness for organized humans!) came up with a list of pluses and minuses for Task2Gather. Here is what she had to say:

Pluses:

• One feature that my project manager really likes is the stats and reports feature. That could take the place of her weekly past-due reports that she generates by hand in a spreadsheet.
• She also likes that you can assign a deadline that shifts with the project’s priority.
• And she likes that you can see how close to completion a project is, but you have to put in hours spent. That begs to ask the question: Would everyone on our team take the time to enter their hours per project?

Minuses:

• Two things that she feels are lacking in Task2Gather are email reminders and when you post messages or comments, the application doesn’t appear to send copies of those messages to the team members assigned to the projects.
• Also, there isn’t a feature where you can upload file attachments.
• She also feels it is really hard to see the tasks, and especially the deadlines. I have to agree with her on that.

Overall:

Most of the features of Task2Gather are either the same or better than Basecamp and in some cases, just presented in a different way.

After getting Marla’s assessment, I asked Olga Shtaub from Task2Gather to address some of the minuses. Here is what she told me:

1. The emails are currently generated only to inform you if a new project was shared with you or when a new task was assigned to you. To notify about any changes in Task2Gather, there is the “News” feature. “News” contains changes made in Task2Gather like comments, deadline edits, task progress or any other changes that take place and that concern your tasks and projects where you participate. The “News” or changes emerge beside the project or task name and are marked with a bold font. Anytime you log in, you can see all changes and check them immediately. The “News” section is refreshed every 5 minutes.
2. Task2Gather is planning to add a new notification system so users can choose the way they want to be notified by the service.
3. The upload feature in Task2Gather is scheduled for release in the beginning of the next year.
4. The company is planning to change a little bit the UI, design and probably the colors of Task2Gather.

Overall, I think that when it comes to project and task management, it really boils down to not only your needs but your preferences. As cloud working continues to become more and more pervasive, the competition amongst the project management applications heats up in the battle to be better. So while Task2Gather may not end up solving my company’s project management quandries that are often very specific to the way Marla and I like to manage, it could be the perfect solution for another Web worker or Web working team.

What are you using today for project management and task management, and how is that solution really working for you?

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Image via Wikipedia (LibSyn)

Before I fell asleep last night, I started thinking about what I’m spending on Web applications. I take advantage of the free levels of apps whenever I can, however, in some cases, I have to give in and pay for the services.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t have buyer’s remorse, but I do think I need to get a firm grasp of what Web apps or SaaS’s I have on autopay on my business credit card because it is getting to be too easy to charge these things.

Here is the list of Web apps I’ve been paying for and why I pay for them:

• Basecamp – $24/month – to keep track of communications and files with clients.
• FreshBooks – $24/month – to manage client invoicing.
• Typepad – $89.50/year for three blogs (about $7.45/month) – to develop three of my many blogs.
• Constant Contact – $15/month – to send out my occasional e-newsletter.
• Cafepress – $6.95/month – to sell Second Life swag.
• LibSyn- $5/month – to host my Cybergrrl Oh podcast about Second Life.
• SpinVox- $9.99/month – to convert my voicemail messages into texts and emails. (My service in the U.S. is actually through UReach.
• MeetUp – $72/6 months ($12/month) – to host several Meetup groups.

Total Fees – $104.39 per month or $1,252.68 per year

I began thinking that I should pay more attention to these payments. If the app is really valuable to my business, maybe I should consider paying for a year’s subscription in advance. Often, an annual subscription is discounted so I could save some money.

Then again, it might just be negligible. CafePress, for example, comes out to be $5/month for an annual subscription which would save me $23 for the year. Well, the theory sounded good when I was thinking about it. Still, if I were to subscribe to many more apps and sites, maybe the savings would become more significant.

Sites like Freshbooks and Basecamp don’t offer an annual fee. They use a pay-as-you-go model without committing you to a long term contract. Freshbooks does offer a lump sum payment where you can opt to pay for a number of months in advance but without any discount.

What are you paying on a monthly basis for Web apps and sites? Which ones and what do they do for you?

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Project Management and Collaboration applications are one of the staples of the typical web worker. And while we’ve covered our share of alternatives, the ubiquitous Basecamp is the one that I seem to run into most often.

With a healthy userbase and a robust API, it’s no surprise that a number of useful add-ons have been created to make our Basecamp lives just that much easier. One such add-on I’ve been testing lately is Periscope by Ten Seven, Interactive.

Periscope is an iGoogle gadget that lets you quickly and easily log activity and time towards your Basecamp projects. It also provides a nice updating snapshot into the activity on your projects, even across multiple accounts. Activity is easily filtered by account or by project.

A hover lets you get a quick glimpse of the detail of each activity and a click takes you directly to the corresponding Basecamp page.

In this initial beta release you are limited to the aforementioned time tracking and logging. For now you’ll still need to visit your project pages to comment or add and complete to-do items. Increased interactivity for to-dos and milestones is on the roadmap for future enhancement though. In true 37signals fashion, Periscope is updated frequently with new functionality.

Periscope is iPhone friendly for easy access on the go, and it also works like a charm on your Windows desktop as a Google Desktop Gadget.

After a successful private beta, Ivan and the Persicope team are ready to open things up a bit. If you’re interested in participating head over to Periscope Gadget and register for access to the public beta which is going live a bit later today.

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The reality is, even though they might each have their own strengths and weaknesses, they really do start to look and work the same. And then I took a look at Staction.

It really is different.

You interact with it differently.

One page – two boxes. That’s it.

You post content, add comments, create action items, log time, all from the same single interface. Enter your content in the box and a context sensitive area to the right lets you choose the options to automatically assign the appropriate tags.

Files can be quickly added and uploaded for sharing, to-dos assigned to others, and messages can edited or replied to easily.

You view your data differently as well.

Staction tracks projects but it’s really about tracking communication, and it does this remarkably well. It creates a single stream of all interactions across all of your projects.

Sound overwhelming? The Stream can be customized, filtered and then saved into views to show only the information that matches your current needs. An RSS feed is also available for each saved view. A demo video demonstrates this nifty feature very well.

Back when I first saw Pownce, I thought that it could possibly work as a small group collaboration tool. The threaded post view and file handling along with the ability to keep messages private between groups were all appealing features. Staction is oddly reminiscent of Pownce but fully fleshed out with the appropriate functionality needed to really make it a productive communication and collaborative environment.

On their home page, the Staction folks mention Basecamp as the standard project management app, and address how they differ.

Staction isn’t a me-too app. It’s not fixing what’s broken with Basecamp, -it’s a different way of looking at how groups get work done. Basecamp is about the project, and about the granular nugget of information. Staction is about the aerial view. With Basecamp you’re in the trenches. With Staction, you’re in the clouds.

If you are used to working in Basecamp or any of the other of it’s ilk, it may take some adjusting time to get used to this new way of viewing your projects. But while Staction may not look and work like other project management applications, it’s not so radical an interface to be difficult to use.

My hunch is that opinions will be polarized. You’ll either appreciate the change or you will stare at your screen wondering where all of your tabs are. There is a certain comfort that comes with a familiar interface and this might just challenge you to think a bit differently about your project and communication. I for one appreciate the new take on things and am eager to implement this in my own work.

Staction is from the same folks who brought us Jumpchart which we also reviewed favorably. While still currently in private beta, I encourage you to take a tour and join their mailing list to register for a chance to get involved.

Does a project stream interest you? Is there life in project management beyond Basecamp?

We do have a limited number of invites available through the links below. Act quickly though, when they’re gone, they’re gone.

http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=c97459059e
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=ddd7ce070a
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=821aad5d7d
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=6b8d088e39
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=612168adb0
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=071bba34e3
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=4d74ac0efc
http://www.staction.com/signup/?code=8d2e75066e

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