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Keep your reader recommendations coming. It is reader feedback that led me to Intervals, a truly superior solution for project management and client invoicing within one integrated web-based application. If you’ve read this blog in the past, you will be well familiar with how much I love Harvest, appreciate Basecamp, and loathe eProject/Daptiv. Enter Intervals, the killer app.

Time Tracking, Tasks & Invoicing

Intervals is both a project management and invoicing system. Its conception of the word "task" is more a part of project management than invoicing. Compared with Harvest, a pure invoicing system which views a "task" as something you charge for, Intervals requires a lot more work to get out an invoice.

Intervals forces you to plan ahead to create tasks in advance, or else feels like dual entry (task and time) when you go to enter time towards an invoice. Annoying when you are spontaneously deciding on tasks to do and just want to quickly enter the time, the way Harvest works quite well.

In Intervals you can track billable time within a “general time” bucket that includes no task, but that can be confusing if you are jumping between activities and want to detail them on the final invoice. I prefer Harvest’s quick and easy way to create new tasks and track time against them at once, rather than as two separate steps.

Within Intervals, you can just click an icon to start tracking time on the very next screen after creating the task, but at that point there will be no access to the "work type" drop-down list, unlike when you select the button “add time to this task” after creating the task or start the time recording on the "Time" tab. And then after you stop the timer and want to actually "apply" the time to the task, it is necessary to then enter the worktype info in another dialogue box, so basically it is the same as using the button in the beginning and having to complete two screens.

In Harvest less is entered when creating the task and the click of an icon button applies that first set of entries to populate all the data that will later be invoiced. That approach is much more streamlined, involving only half the data entry for each task, which really adds up.

I like that Intervals includes due dates on tasks by default, which Harvest doesn’t, since it isn’t thinking of a task as a “to do” so much as a billable unit of time. Instead of having it be so easy to create new tasks and log time against them as in Harvest, one is more prone to have fewer tasks and then keep returning to them in order to log time against them over several days. It isn’t that you can’t use Harvest in just as “organized” a way as Intervals. It's just that it is so easy to be sloppier in Harvest that there is a greater likelihood you will be.

In Intervals time tracking is a part of project management, and invoicing is an outgrowth of the fact that you already logged the time against a project. In Harvest time tracking is done solely for the sake of invoicing. If all you need is well organized, super quick and easy invoicing, Harvest is your solution.

Project Management Evaluation

Just as Intervals can be compared to Harvest when it comes to time tracking and invoicing, it can be compared to Basecamp when it comes to project management. Basecamp also includes time tracking features, but since they don't extend to include invoicing, it is an incomplete solution, requiring the addition of another app like Harvest to complete the job.

Project management is the one area in which I thought Intervals might not outshine the competition. User interface preferences vary a great deal from person to person, as do business processes from company to company. I recognize others may have a very different view of this, but when I compared the Basecamp and Intervals user experiences, again I wound up solidly preferring Intervals. The user interface is more intuitive, easier to read, and easier to navigate. There are also a number of pre-made reports that can be quite helpful.

Like Basecamp, the Intervals project management approach is more about organizing communication around tasks that have been done or need to be done by different people. It is less Gantt oriented than a software like eProject/Daptiv, which seeks to imitate MS Project within a SaaS app. I don't mind losing the Gantt view, but the one thing I couldn’t find in Intervals that I did want was a way to make one milestone/task’s start dependent on another’s completion. When one task gets pushed back, this affects all subsequent tasks, but how do you show this in Intervals without having to manually edit all subsequent tasks/milestones that should be dependent? The answer is found within their user forum:

“We used to use Microsoft Project heavily for all of our projects and we found that we spent too much time tending to and tuning the schedule. Intervals deliberately does not have task dependencies the way traditional project management solutions work. Via trial and error we found that Gantt charts are great at scheduling and articulating the steps to build something, but aren't that useful managing the day to day tasks of getting the work done. Intervals is very strong on the task tracking and getting things done side, but weak on the scheduling side. The milestones and light scheduling piece we [have implemented] strengthen the scheduling side quite a bit. You [can] create a milestone, attach tasks to it, and manage the tasks and milestones via a calendar view. You [can] drag and drop and move tasks and milestones around. It is definitely not traditional task dependencies, but it is a different way to approach the issue.”

The other major feature of traditional PM where Intervals takes a different road is resource allocation. To quote their user forum once more: “Intervals does not feature traditional resource allocation. We are working on a periscope report that will show how much work has been assigned vs. how much is done, but it is different than the resource allocation found in traditional project management (no resource leveling for example). It is meant to answer the question of "how much work do we have on the books" and can be filtered by client, person, project, etc. It may or may not do the trick depending on your needs.”

Like Basecamp, Intervals is taking a non-Gantt approach to project management. I find that the calendar editing function within Intervals is easy enough to use to make it pretty easy to manually move dependent tasks when you want, and at least with Intervals I can pick any timeframe I want to see in calendar view (unlike Basecamp).

To sum it up, as one of Interval’s customer testimonials proclaims: “At the end of the day, the core platform of Basecamp™ did not focus on time, work flow and reporting, which is where Intervals excels.” Amen.

The Costs

Pricing of Intervals is done by the number of projects, whereas in Harvest it is done by the number of users. With Intervals, for only $20 per month I get up to 15 projects with unlimited users (both staff and client users). In Harvest I get unlimited projects, but am on a plan that allows for only 1 user and pay $12 per month. Of course, since Harvest isn’t a project management app, you may not need more than one person to be able to log in, just whoever generates invoices. Still, the Harvest price point jumps from $12 for 1 user to $40 for 5, so if you do need more than one person entering their time in the app, you're going to pay for it. You can’t pay the same $20 as for Intervals and get 2.5 users, and this is just the time tracking and invoicing feature set we're talking about.

Basecamp's pricing for a plan that includes time tracking on each project, but no client invoicing, is $49/month for unlimited users and 35 projects. So combining Basecamp with Harvest would cost $61/month, and get you project management, time tracking related to projects that can be exported into the invoicing app, invoicing, a 35 project limited, unlimited PM users, 1 invoicing user, plus 10GB of document storage.

With Intervals, for a third that price I get the features of both Basecamp and Harvest within one integrated package, and the whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts. At that price, I do get fewer projects and less document storage - 15 projects, 1 GB storage - but there are still unlimited users, so clients can be invited to contribute to mark tasks as done and view project progress. For my company, 15 projects is sufficient, since you can activate and deactivate projects at will, and we are never working on more than 15 projects at once. It would be nice to have more native storage which would obsolesce our use of ftp to share files during data migrations, but it's not a deal breaker.

Needless to say, I will be canceling my Basecamp and Harvest subscriptions at the end of the next billing period, and making the switch to Intervals. Try Intervals out for 30 days yourself to see if it is an approach that will work for your business.

(Special Nice-To-Have: Intervals creates a permalink page for each task, so that contributors can conveniently be directed to that specific task page.)

Labels: Project_Management, Recommended_Apps, SaaS

I'm very much liking Basecamp for most project management tasks, but I'm just not seeing where the extra expense is justified to get the time tracking included. Not only do I not report on time in the same context as I track projects, but the Basecamp time tracking feature is pretty lame.

You basically just enter the number of hours and a note about what you did. That's it. The system puts in your name and there is no other info you can include. If you want an invoice to be created off the time tracking you can export a csv file, but then you have to manually create the invoice out of the stack of records with these random notes signifying what was done.

Compare that to Harvest's time tracking service, which feeds directly into an invoice that the system will even send to the client for you, along with follow up notes after a pre-determined period you set, until you mark the invoice as paid. Harvest allows you to set up standard tasks for a given project or all projects, enter the rate charged for the task (my company uses hours, but could be by other units also), then log your time on your desktop by selecting the task from a drop down then clicking a button in a widget to start the timer. When you are done simply click the timer again to stop it, and presto, your hours have been entered in Harvest for that task.

You can also log in to add time, and add notes to any task to supplement whatever is in the task name. Then invoicing the client is as simple as selecting what time period to invoice for and pressing send. The invoice goes out with your logo, messages, and invoice as PDF, plus imbedded in body of email. Perfect! And all for anywhere from just $12/month for one user to $5-9/month per user for 10 or more users.

True, Basecamp's time tracking comes at an extra cost of just $26/month for unlimited users, but in this case you truly get what you pay for. It is simply too limited an option in it's utility to be worth even $26/month, no matter how many scattered employees I was trying to track time for.

The fundamental Basecamp approach is the reason its time tracking feature isn't all that great. They offer all around collaboration as a project management method. For my company, time tracking is a part of invoicing, not project management. But for some companies they want to see the time being logged against a project within the context of the project itself. Instead of for invoicing, they track time to see how many hours are being done on a project by all the people involved.

The good news is, Harvest can receive time tracking information from Basecamp, so if you do have a reason to want time tracking in the project management system, you can still send the info over to Harvest for invoicing. You could then have just a single user Harvest account for the person who generates the invoices.

Another cool integration is that you can even use Twitter to send time updates from the road from your mobile phone. So if you aren't going near a laptop with wifi access anytime soon and don't want to have to write your time down somewhere for entry later, just twit it straight into Harvest from your car!

With the use of Harvest for time tracking, I can use the $24 monthly Basecamp account, and have a complete time tracking and invoicing solution. If one only worked on one or two projects at a time he/she could even use the free Basecamp account, though that is not the case for me. I am a real fan of both software services, and don't mind flipping between them to get the best of all worlds, instead of limiting myself to an integrated service that causes me to compromise on each feature.

Labels: Project_Management, Recommended_Apps, SaaS

It was years ago that the company at which I was SalesForce Admin decided they wanted me to also become the Go-To person for the new eProject software service they were purchasing. A consultant came in to train me and one of the PMPs for a week and then went home each day to work on our config based on the info we had shared and his experience with other clients.

As a SalesForce.com implementer myself now, I definitely know the value of having a consultant guide a business through the implementation of a complex piece of software. But should project management be considered in that category? Having no background with MS Project (to which I would compare eProject, in terms of its Gantt chart focus, etc.), I never did really groc eProject. Neither did any of the Product Managers who came to me in that first month with questions about how to get the reports they wanted out of the system. And that's what you get for $50 per user per month.

Now let's turn our attention to Basecamp. I set up a Basecamp account for my consulting business in about 20 minutes -- that includes 3 minutes deciding which service plan I wanted, 2 minutes entering all my information, 10 minutes watching the introductory video, then 5 minutes uploading my logo and customizing the defaults to my liking. Here's what that first customization screen looks like:


It's a small image showing a wide screen, so you may not be able to read all the type, but I'm sure you can see that it's a pretty simple setup. Within just minutes you upload your logo, choose which default items you want to delete (click the trash can beside them) or add (type into the little box then click "Add" button). You can also customize display colors and add unlimited additional users. Did you hear me right? I said UNLIMITED additional users, both from within your company or if you want you can allow access by your clients.

I chose the $50 monthly account which is the lowest amount that gets you time tracking. There is also a free account you could use to try it out, though it won't give you a chance to test the time tracking feature. All Basecamp's accounts come with the first 30 days free, so I would suggest doing the $50 account for the first few weeks so you can explore all the features, then downgrade to a cheaper or free plan if you don't think you really need the time tracking (or in the case of the free plan, don't need considerably more features, such as file storage, multiple users, or multiple projects).

For all you Gantt-heads, you are probably stuck with MS Project, eProject and their ilk. The Basecamp approach is entirely different. Once you've created a project (also very intuitive process), here's a screen you will see for tracking milestones:


As you can see, this is quite different from a Gantt chart. The idea behind Basecamp is to focus on organizing how people interact and share information (verbal info and files) on a project so that everyone knows what they are responsible to do when, how what they do or don't do affects others, and what others are doing and when they did it. So instead of a sole project manager who is responsible for herding cats (I mean managing project participants), everyone on the project shares that responsibility. Social rules apply and no one wants to be so obviously revealed as the one person who keeps pushing the project back when everyone else is working together well.

Basecamp does allow tasks to cascade with dependencies, just like in a Gannt, but if you really need to show all your project timelines and milestones within a Gantt chart, Basecamp won't be the solution for you. It presents the information more in the week appearance of a calendar than a full spreadsheet view that can show large numbers of items across a long time period.

But for those who can adopt a different way of thinking about what it means to manage a project for successful delivery, here's one last screenshot, Time Tracking:

Basecamp consists of To Do lists, Milestones, shared files, Time Tracking, Messages, Writeboards, and if you use 37Signals' other product, Campfire, integrated Chat. By combining these features it aims to keep everyone synchronized with each other so that milestones are known and achieved on time and within budget. If you are new to project management or open to an innovative approach, you will be joining the ranks of USA Today, Addidas, and Warner Brothers (a few of Basecamp's many customers) in opting for what I think is a great online project management solution.

I tell all my clients about Basecamp and for any that want it without investing the minimal time it takes to set it up I'll do it for them for a charge of about 100 bucks. It's always the case that I'm already familiar with their business process from designing whatever other service I'm providing them, so it doesn't take me long to translate that into a customized project management solution. There are 2-3 minute videos within Basecamp on each object's screen, and the system really is pretty intuitive, so most users self train, but with a few clients I've also tacked 30 minutes of Basecamp training onto whatever training I am already doing for their users, just to make it a seamless process.

Whether you dive into Basecamp on your own or have someone help you, you will be glad you did. Even if you decide to stick with another service to get your Gantt fix, for just $50 a month for unlimited usage, I would urge you to check out Basecamp and see how you might integrate its benefits. If you do, please come back and post a comment to let others know how you are working between the two and how it's going.

Labels: Project_Management, Recommended_Apps, SaaS