How to make team management more proficient

Barely managing to find my way out of a difficult situation caused by over-reaching I realized I needed a tool to help me with managing both workflow and the projects that my team and I are involved in. That’s when I came across dobambam.com

Getting Started

As easy as baking a pie, provided you know how to: after I submitted my name, e-mail, password and an address for the site I was good to go. The tutorial was quite extensive and thorough and covered most of the functions any basic user might need. When it was done I had a pretty good grasp of what I could do and that had me good and excited. While it’s clearly designed to be a collaboration tool, it can also be used.

On your own

Working alone on a specific path of action is something I’m very familiar with but I found that just having a To-Do list doesn’t quite cut it when the stress is piling up and deadlines are looming. Because it offers an incredible degree of customization I was able to set everything up so as I don’t have to be distracted by every little change made by others that are working on different aspects and set my own milestones and tasks leading up to them.

Team Work

This is where the project management tool really shines. Through Chime everybody can clock in exactly how much time they’ve been putting in for any task and that allows a better understanding of what are the most difficult aspects where more resources may need to be allocated. As a side note, you can also add Anchor wiki to be available for the project and Springloops for version control with deployment tools.

I found especially exiting the e-mail to task function because you’re not always at your work station when something new comes up. Being able to create tasks and assign them just by sending an e-mail so that when you do get to the office it might already be done – sweet! Speaking of e-mail, I also stumbled upon the option to be notified when any change is made or, for instance, once a day. Depends on what kind of manager you are, if you want to be extremely involved or just have an overview of what your team’s been doing.

A critical point in any project, and even more so if the client insists on having access, is managing permissions so I was a bit worried about it. Other tools I’ve tried out have a few presets that often cause some degree of problems because changing a user from one to another means giving him too much access to other sensitive areas. Much like any aspect of BamBam!, that’s customizable too and if the need should arise you can just create a new permission set.

Conclusions

What it all comes down to in the end is costs and for all the above I was willing to campaign to my boss for a lot more than what 84kids, the creators, are asking: $7 for every user above 10 while offering no limit for storage and projects. It’s a great tool to have and use, a great platform and I don’t think I mentioned this yet, a great design.