In today’s video, I’m actually going to answer one common question that I receive from my subscribers all the time which is how to manage projects and track everything when outsourcing. Well, the only best way to do this is having a good project management system and the one that I find very easy to use, convenient as well as available for free is BasecampHQ. It’s basically paid where you can have access to its more features but you can also have it for free with its basic system which is still worth it for entrepreneurs like me managing only a handful of staff. Here’s how I use BasecampHQ for free to track everything in my business successfully.

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All right, I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences in using BasecampHQ in your business as for me it’s really the simplest among other project management systems to use. I have previously used ActiveCollab but due to some of their server issues, I have switched to BasecampHQ. Now while using it I can say it’s one of my best decisions.

Remember, Just Outsource It!

Tyrone Shum

Transcript:

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Hi everyone, it’s Tyrone from Outsourcinglive.com and thanks very much for coming to check out the dedicated channel on outsourcing.

Now inside this video, I want to share with you a really, really neat piece of software called BasecampHQ. It’s a very, very simple and easy to use project management system which I highly recommend to anyone to use.

I personally use it with my team and I’ve been able to do many, many simple great things and get work done much, much faster with this system. So let me just delve into it and I want to show you how to setup an account that you can access and use straightaway with your team.

Now if you’ve got 3, 4, 10 people that’s no problem. You can setup a free account with BasecampHQ right now to be able to do that. If you have multiple projects, I can actually show you as well too how to be able to just continue to use the same free account to be able to manage all your projects in one.

Okay so let’s just jump into it. First things first is go to Basecamphq.com which you can see right here and you’ll see that this is your first screen that you landed. To be able to sign up and setup a free account, simply go to Plans and Pricings right here and then at the bottom of the Plans and Pricings you’ll see numerous different things. All right, the first thing you’ll see is obviously there’s different plans and pricing. You can sign up to get a $99 per month line or $49 per month but what they didn’t show you very much is there’s a free plan right down here. So if you just click on that one, that allows you to be able to setup a free account with Basecamp so let me show you how to do that.

Click there and it’s very simple. The process is quick and fast and simply just type in your details and then you’ll be up and running within probably a couple of minutes. So let’s type in my details – and once you’ve typed in your details, it’ll automatically send you an email. You don’t need to confirm anything, all you have to do is just really just set it all up and you’ll be up. Username – so outlive – password, just choose a password that you’ve got there and re-enter it again.

Okay make sure you select the right timezone. So I’m in Sydney, I’m going to click on this and that’s it. Scroll all the way down to the end and just ensure that you’ve got everything that’s correct and then click on Create my account. Within probably a minute or so, the account will be created, you’ll get that via email, your details – and then you can sign in. There you go, it automatically signed you in and that’s it. It’s so, so easy to use and simply click OK, let’s go.

Now you’ll find that you can customize this whole layout and everything. If you want to customize it, all you have to do is simply go up to here where it says Templates and Settings. And you can simply just customize it to the way you want – you can change the color of the theme, you can change the style, the layout, anything that you want. You can even upload your logos. But the first task and the most important thing is to get people into the system first.

So click on All People. And simply enter in the people who are part of your team. Obviously I’m the first person who’s the owner of this that I setup and that’ll probably be you if you’re the manager or the owner of the business. And all you have to do is simply add a new person. And what you’ll do is once you add a new person, Basecamp automatically sends a notification to the person that you’re adding to the system. If you’ve got a team of developers, virtual assistants or so forth, this is perfect for that because it automatically sets it up and you can assign them to certain tasks or certain work that’s assigned to the system.

Okay now I’m just going to give you a quick little example on how to be able to setup and use this whole project management for free without having to sign up and setup multiple projects. Say you’ve got concurrently 10 different projects running. You can actually continue to use just this free Basecamp account without having to sign up to the ones that run over a majority of say monthly rates and so forth. You can go to this method or you can pay for the projects per month and use the Basecamp but I’m gonig to just show you quickly how I do it and this is what I’ve been doing.

All right so let’s create the first project, click on here. I’m going to call the name of my project the name of my company. So I’m just going to call it Outsourcing Live and then I’m gonig to click on Create this project.

Now once you’ve created that first project, you don’t want to add anymore projects, you want to actually add more milestones in between and let me explain to you how this is going to work. Essentially, what we’re going to be doing is we’re just going to be having that one main project which is your company. I’m just going to draw it here – your company, and then what we’re going to do is each milestone which is right below we’re going to assign projects to it and you can have hundreds and hundreds of milestones. This is how we can do it this way and it works out just perfectly.

And then within each milestone, you’ll have what we call a To-do list and inside of those To-do lists, I usually just put in a list of To-dos with set timeframes as well and this is the easiest and most quickest way to be able to get your whole system setup all for free. And then obviously within each individual To-do lists you have To-do tasks. That’s how Basecamp works.

Now if you’re to go for – this is the free option I should say so that way you’re aware. This is the free option and this is the way I am. If you wan to go for the paid option, then obviously you pay pretty much per project. So if you have say project one, project two, etc you basically pay for those different projects. And obviously if you’ve got more than one project, you got to just pay a monthly fee.

Now if you’re just a company like I am where I’ve just got 3 staff in my team that I need and manage those three, then setting up a free account is probably sufficient enough. But if you’re setting up a system where you’re requiring clients to access the projects, and you’re requiring your staff to access those different projects, then this is probably the best route to go. But because our business is basically not client based but we base it on putting projects and setting projects getting completed and then delivering those directly to other people then we don’t need to use that.

Okay so that hopefully gives you a clear idea on how it works. But let’s just jump back into Basecamp again and I’m going to just finish off to show you what to do.

All right the first thing I’ll do is go to Milestones and I’ll just create one project. Let’s say we’ll call this one Project 1 and this is test phase something like that. I’m going to create the project or the milestone.

Obviously you want to also set the date to be due not to 23rd of May which is today but you want to also set the date for say – I don’t know, to two months or something depending on a project. Let’s add another one just for another example as well – Project 2 implementation phase.

Okay and this time around I’m going to set it for say finishing July, end of July. Okay so I’ll create that milestone then there you go, there’s two projects that I’ve just created using the milestones.

And the next thing is create To-do list which goes with these milestones. Pretty easy to do just put in the To-do list. Let’s say for the testing phase, install and setup site for example and then you just want to assign that To-do list to say Project 1 or Project 2. So we’ll click on that, create the list.

Once that’s assigned then you basically break down each individual task that needs to be done. So install WordPress might be the first one and then assign it to whoever, it might be me. Put the due date in there, so it might be two days to do that. Then maybe install or maybe setup plugins – and do the same thing as well. Maybe take three days, etc.

As you can see these are examples but what I just want to mention to you is that you don’t need to physically go and set this up if you don’t want to. You could get your web developer to layout the whole plan inside for you and this is just basically keeping them accountable. They may know what needs to be done and this is what they need to layout so you could just give these tasks to them. But I’m just showing you as an example how to go about handling and using BasecampHQ for free without having to go out and purchse extra projects if you choose to go down this path. And this is just a little mini hack that I’ve created and worked out over the time.

Okay same thing again, if you want to create more To-do lists to associate to your other projects, just go through and follow that exact process. And as you can see there’s one To-do here, there’ll be another To-do there if you set that up and so forth.

Okay hopefully you’ve understood and taken away some information here and I really do hope that you can implement this for your system if you haven’t got a project management system right now. And this is a very, very easy to use, very simplistic, very powerful way of geting work done within the team.

If you like this, just simply share down below, let people know. Feel free to leave a comment down below this post as well at Outsourcinglive.com and I’d love to hear some of your feedback as well.

All right thank you very much for watching this video then. My name is Tyrone Shum and I’ll see you inside the next video.

Now, if you like more resources like this one, you can find them inside Mass Outsource Mastermind along with video tutorials and step by step instructions showing exactly how I use them. To get a 30-day no risk trial membership to Mass Outsource Mastermind, simply visit FreeVideoSet.com. Until next time, I wish you success in your quest for outsourcing.
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