John Jonas shows how Basecamp keeps his Filipino contractors organized. Three questions structure every project: what is it, who's involved, and what are the steps. He walks through real examples like Ads and Content, showing how task lists and role tagging create accountability and make delegation actually work.
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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 184, how to use a project management system with your OFS. So I started using Basecamp to manage projects in about 2005. It was just me. I didn't have anyone working for me. It was just my organization and task list, and things got done sooner and I got to save ideas for later. Since then, I've gotten super comfortable with how project management works and specifically with Basecamp. But I know there's a lot of you that haven't done this, and you're kind of hesitant because it's a big piece of software and you don't know how it works or you don't know. You don't know if you should jump in or not. So I want to talk through this a little bit. So if you haven't used a project manager system before, here are the three questions that you should probably be asking as you get into it. Number one, what is this project and what's the end goal of it? That's what you're going to title it. You're going to write a description about it, and then you're going to say, who are the people that I need involved? And you're going to tag those people. And then you're going to say, what are the. What are the steps that I need to do? And you're going to create tasks for those steps. And in each task, you're going to tag the right specific people for that task. And basically every project management system revolves around this concept. What are we doing? Who's involved? What are the steps? Now, let me break this down a little bit for you and tell you how we do this inside of our project management system. So we have a project for ads. So onlinejobs ph ads, which includes ads for 1vaoa, and ads for outsourcinglever.com and ads for ofstasks.com and for ofsguide.com all of these ads. Inside of that, we have a task list for the actual ads. Every time I create ads, or every time someone creates ads, they go in and they post the ads here. And we tag the right people, which includes the video editor. The person is going to run the ads, and the person who manages the whole process. Then we have another list of what happens with this. For each individual ad, things are going to happen. Editing is going to happen. Writing is going to happen. Ads are going to happen. So those Things get put into a separate list that someone on my team is going to create that list for me. And then as things get done, a specific video gets edited, it gets checked off, and that video gets added to our library of ads. When the ad gets posted, that gets checked off. This task system, this project of ads, is like a. It's kind of like a living thing where it's constantly changing, it ebbs and it flows. It gets a whole bunch of stuff added to it, and then it shrinks and shrinks and shrinks and there's. There's barely anything there until people create a whole bunch more ads. Our content project, project inside of Basecamp is a little bit different, where there's constantly content being created and it'll grow a little bit and it'll shrink a little bit, but there's always things being added to it, and then there's always things being checked off. And then when, when a project gets added, like, we're going to write this blog post about this thing. Well, let's add a separate list about that. Here are the things that we need to add to that. Here's who's responsible for these things. We tag the right people. As they get done, they get checked off, and then they get moved on to separate tasks. When they get published, then we mark them off and we complete the whole project or we complete that whole task list for that specific piece of content. For me, there's a couple things that are important here. Number one, it allows us to create things and remember them. So if we were doing a lot of things at the same time, and if I just send an email to someone and they don't do that thing, well, it gets forgotten. If it's in a project manager system, though, then it gets written down and it's easy to see, like, oh, we're going through this list of tasks. Oh, hey, what's going on with that one in email? That's impossible because there's hundreds of emails every day. Another thing that's important with it is it holds people accountable. Like, what have you done? What have you checked off? What have you marked off? Well, I can see exactly what you're working on or what you're not working on, what you're doing or what you're not doing. And then I can also see how busy is someone, how many things are assigned to you. Are we overworking you or are you doing okay? So to me, using a project management system is essential to my business. It helps keep us on track. It helps keep. Push things forward. It allows me to have someone else manage projects and to still see what's going on with those projects. So in the description below, I'll link to a video that I created showing you exactly like how I set up a basecamp project, and hopefully that's helpful to you.
