Localization Academy

How To Use Basecamp As Localization Project Manager

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Is Basecamp any good for localization project managers?

Welcome to another episode in this series, where every month we’ll check out a new project management platform and see how viable it is for localization. All online software will be either free or with a free trial, so you can try it on your own.

In this video, I’ll show you how to use Basecamp for project management. We’ll use a simple and complex localization projects to demonstrate the different options available for PMs.


Andrej Zito 

Hi, everyone! This is Andrej from Localization Academy. Welcome to a new video. In this one, I’m going to show you briefly how you can use Basecamp to manage and track your localization projects. Let’s get right into it. Okay, let’s see my account, what we’re going to do first is we’re going to create a new project. So make a new project. This one, we always start with Project A, simple project into four languages, create this project. Now, this is our let’s say, project dashboard or interface. And here we have a bunch of stuff. So this is kind of like tools. That’s how Basecamp calls it, you can see here change tools, you can enable or disable some of them. And by default, you have a message board, to-dos documents and files, can fire schedule and automatic check ins, the main thing that we’re going to be using are, of course, to-dos because that’s where you can, let’s say lay out the tasks that need to be done for your project. And you’re also going to see how the to-dos impact or create automatically the schedule as well. So let’s go right into the to-dos. To keep it simple, because for Project A, we’re just going to illustrate very simple project with four languages that have the same set of tasks, I’m just going to call this a main list and describe it to-dos so at translation, review, and delivery. Okay, these are all the tasks that we have for Project A, you can also customize a bunch of things for your to-dos, right click here, you can assign it to someone you can set who to notify, what is most important for us is you can select the date, here it says due on, but once you click it, you can specify that it runs for multiple days. And this is what allows you to set the start date and end date for task. So for translation, let’s say we’re going to start next Monday. And we’re going to end three weeks after. So that’s the end of July, Save changes. Next, we scheduled the review and delivery will be completed on Aug 5. There. So now when I go back to Project A. And I go to the schedule, you can see that the task, the to-dos that we just entered are here, entered on the calendar. Fortunately, as you may know, I’m a big fan of Gantt charts, I think that’s the best way how you can visually display what needs to be done across your projects on different days. But here, the approach is slightly different. You can still have the information of what needs to be done on particular day. But it’s just sorted as a sort of a table or a list of things. So here you can see that Monday, July 11, we’re starting to translation. And then if I scroll down on August 1, we’re starting to review. So in a way, this still gives you the option to see, let’s say day by day, what’s happening on your project. So that’s the main thing that we wanted to do for Project A. Message board, campfire, we’re using that right now, documents file, automation rings, we won’t be using that either. One final thing that I want to do is to edit the project. And here you have the optional thing which we didn’t set initially, which we couldn’t have set initially. And that is to add the start and end dates. And so for this project I’m going to pick restarting on July 11. And we’re finishing on August 5. And the reason why I’m set weights at this dates, I think this is a very, very nice neat feature is that you have this sort of like progress bar here for your project. And for Project B, I’m going to set the start a little bit earlier. So you’re going to see it in a while. It’s kind of like indicates how far you are in the project. And the second thing why it’s important is that when you go through your lineup, it shows something like a Gantt chart. So on a timeline view you can see when your project starts and when it ends, but that’s about it. You cannot see any more details here. You just can click and go inside your project. So the same way I’m going to create project B and go

Andrej Zito 

to the to-dos. And for this one, one way how you can utilize the lists is that you can for example create a list for your language independent tasks. And then we can create another list, which would be, let’s say, for German, Japanese. If I go back, we can create one for French and Korean. Now, you can also order them. And then you can add, say, for this one, we normally do reprocessing right there. So I edit a bunch of tasks just randomly for our Project B. And now if we go back to Project B, you can see the schedule here. And again, it shows what we should be doing today. So today, we should be running translation for German, Japanese, and MTPE for French and Korean. Now, final thing, if we go back to the lineup, it doesn’t show anything. And the reason for that is that I didn’t set the date of the project on July 25. July 25, save Changes. Okay, so now this is what I was talking about. You can see here the green indicator, which shows how far we are in project. And now when I go back to the lineup, it also shows the project be here. So that’s it. That’s my quick tutorial for Basecamp and how you could use it for your localization projects. If you enjoyed this video. If you found some value in it. Make sure you subscribe to our channel Localization Academy. There are more videos like this covering other platforms. See ya in some other video. Bye bye.

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