John Jonas walks through how OnlineJobs.ph manages large projects in Basecamp. He starts with idea generation, breaks work into tasks with detailed instructions, tags team members, and delegates process ownership to managers as the team grew to 40 people. Different team members work differently, but everything stays centralized in Basecamp.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 134, how we work on big projects with Basecamp. So we do a lot of projects at onlinejobs ph. There's always improvements being done on the software. There is marketing to be done, there's content to be created. All of these things get run through our project manager system. Things like outsourcing lever or one VA away or ofsguide.com or vasmadeasy.com or all of. All of the projects that we do get run through Basecamp. Some of them run similar to each other and some of them run differently inside of Basecamp. So I'm going to talk about different ways that we do things. So, for me, I am the idea guy in the business, and my job is to create ideas and systems and processes and then teach them to someone else to do or hand them off to someone else to do. So here's usually how I work through a project. So I create a task in Basecamp. I give instructions, I give information, I give training. I tag the right people from my team and then I ask for input. From there, I start getting input and then I give feedback and we discuss the project and we make decisions. We make decisions on how things should be implemented. We might then tag more people who are going to be doing the implementation of that thing. And then we communicate through the whole process, both the OFS in the Philippines and me or my business partner here. We'll talk through things inside of Basecamp. Solutions get created, things get implemented all the way through on this single task. When I had like 10 people working for me, that was really easy. When I got more and more and more people, it became more and more difficult. Now there's 40. And so I found that I needed to have other people driving processes. And so I recently promoted Jovan as the online jobs PH manager. I have Jessica, who is managing our social, some of our social media and our advertising. I have Julia, who helps with the podcast and some social media. And they're. They're all managing teams. I have Jam, who is managing customer service people. There's. I have Juneelo, who is managing admin. What do I call it? Admin verification stuff. So they manage processes on their own. And when we create a task in Basecamp, I tag them one of those people depending on what the process is, and they'll discuss it and then they will move on and help other people in the process. So here's some more detail into how I work and how other people work. For me, I want everything in one place. And it's really nice for me to create a task and to have discussion in that task and to come back to it over and over and over again and see, oh, yeah, what did we talk about here? Let's go back up and look at it and find it. But for Julia, who is managing the podcast, where there's constant content creation and constant process. Not processes, but there's a process that needs to be done over and over and over and over and over again, you need to track which ones have been done. Julia creates tons and tons of tasks in Basecamp for the things that she works on, and it works for her. For me, it drives me crazy. In fact, it drives me crazy enough that I had to create a separate project for her to create her tasks and her task lists. And there's so many tasks there that I couldn't. I couldn't handle anymore. Like, there's too many things going on here that I am not involved in. So they need. That group needs their own project. Jessica, in the way that she manages thing, is kind of an in between where she creates more tasks than I do, fewer tasks than Julia, and she manages the people inside of those tasks with conversation and fewer lists. Julia is very task oriented. She wants to check things off. Jessica is less task oriented and yet still accomplishes all of the things that she needs to get done. So for us, everything runs in Basecamp. Basecamp allows us to run projects the way that the individual people want them to be run. It allows us to interact with it the way that we all want to interact with it. For example, my business partner, Dan, never logs into Basecamp. He only ever sees things through email. Anything that he needs to work on gets emailed to him, and he responds through email. And it works, and it works seamlessly. Whereas I get into Basecamp every single day. I don't actually know how Julia and Jessica do it or how Jovan does it. I guess I don't really care how they do it as long as it's working for us and for each of us individually, which Basecamp does for us. So I would be interested in hearing how you work on projects like systems. Do you use, what software? How do you. Or how do your OFS handle it? Who's. Who's creating the tasks? What kind of tasks? I'd be interested in hearing how things work for you.
