Whether you use an outside consultant or an internal consultant, responsibility for designing a project is shared between the client and the service provider. After all the client knows (or needs to know) how the project will eventually be assessed, by whom; and what will be required to put the recommendations into action.

Designing projects to achieve high-impact results becomes even more important when the economy is under threat, budgets get squeezed, and managers’ performance is under more intense scrutiny. I see this all the time in my consulting practice.

If, as many people predict, we’re heading into another recession in 2008, knowing how to scope and organize a project will become increasingly important. It could have a big impact on your ability to get the resources you need to achieve your business or department objectives.

Here’s an outline that can help you do that.

I often work with an extended team of experienced designers, writers, web producers, developers and so on. Collaborating with other team members — or our mutual client — used to be a challenge before we discovered Basecamp from 37Signals. Basecamp offers a safe, secure, inexpensive hosted service to coordinate our activities. It’s lightweight, easy to use, and works well for both Windows and Mac OS X users across a range of browsers.

How We Use It

We can manage a joint calendar with milestones and simple assignments, keep an active to-do list, post messages, upload/download project files, and share comments on work in process. The user interface for managing content is simple and straightforward, as long as you rename Basecamp’s default categories into tags that are relevant to your client and/or the project.

Recently I’ve used it for several projects:

• brand strategy and brand architecture — for a leading online advertising technology provider, as well as a leader in the casual games arena
• a business plan for a consumer-facing start-up — multiple contributors working on different components of the business plan

It also supports RSS feeds, email notifications, and calendar synchronization if your calendar manager is compatible with the iCal format.

Great for Small Businesses

This is a wonderful tool for small businesses, especially those in the creative arena, operating without an in-house IT staff. It’s especially helpful if you run your business without an Exchange server because it provides some of the core functionality of Sharepoint with much less hassle for server administration.