In "Powered by 37Signals," Keith Robinson of Blue Flavor details how his team has added Backpack to its arsenal.
This little post is really about one particular 37Signals product, Backpack, but I figured I’d give it an impressive title as we actually use a few of their products to run core parts of our business. Honestly, I don’t know how’d we’d survive without them.
But Backpack!? We’ve just now started using it and it’s been fan-frickin-tastic.
We’ve got a small team doing lots and lots of work. Things like schedules, internal communication, workload reporing and the like have always been a bit of a problem, mainly with distraction. There is a need, mostly by me, to know what people are working on and what they’re getting done so I can properly resource them. There is also a need for everyone else to stay in touch without constantly badgering...
About a month ago I read about Backpack’s new Journal feature. It seemed very interesting and after about a week of playing with it, I decided to get the rest of the team to try it out. Now we’ve got an amazing status tool (ala Twitter) AND an ongoing record of what everyone has an is working on. I find this really useful in planning my resources and projects. It’s also got all sorts of side benefits; keeping the team in touch in a low-noise way, reducing distraction by allowing people to announce that they’re busy. “Hey don’t bug me! I’m heads-down!!”
Keith also gives kudos to other features in Backpack:
The Shared Calendar
We didn’t replace ALL of our calendaring needs with Backpack’s shared calendar, but it greatly simplified scheduling PTO, client meetings and events. That stuff was a MESS before and now it’s all nice, clean and sparkly. That alone would have been worth the price.The Rest
The team is making great use of the pages and their lists, etc. I’ve taken to recording how I do EVERYTHING around the office there (unless it’s shared info, we use Writeboards in Basecamp for that, but it could do.) An aside, business owners, this is something that’s helped me immensely.If you find yourself constantly re-learning how to do things (ship a package, new employee paperwork, etc.) record it somewhere, like Backpack, and thank yourself later.
So, yeah, Backpack makes a great back-up brain. Oh, and it’s got reminders. Can I tell you how awesome that is? Nick forgets. Yeah, all the time. It’s so nice to be able to set reminders for him.
Backpack makes a very affordable and powerful intranet-like tool. I’m so happy we started using it. Kudos to the guys over at 37signals.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.
