Design your way

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Managing people and workflow is one of the more difficult beasts to tame because of the incredible number of ways and various pace everybody goes at. There have been some tries at getting all potential tools used for it organized under the same ‘umbrella’ but I found that all have pretty much come a bit short because of various reasons, all centered behind one main idea: they came to be, due to a need and when the software or tool met that need for the developers, there wasn’t really any need to go forward and implement more features that others might require.

The how

Finding myself in need of a good collaboration tool, I stumbled upon BamBam! The first thing that struck me was the name, which rather suggested destruction than coming together in a project, but I figured I’d give it a try nonetheless and the outcome was 01001100 01101111 01110110 01100101 (that’s love, for the binary impaired) at (almost) first sight.

I’d expected that I would have to create a master account and then one for everybody on my team that would be contributing but it was way easier than that: I just had to type in my name, e-mail address and a site address for the project and get started. Bringing the people that were to be working on it on board was as ‘complicated’ as sending them an e-mail.

The why

I was looking for something a bit more than a to-do list that everybody could see and the tutorial convinced me that I had the right tool for the job. When creating the project I could choose, schematic included, what type of a collaboration I’d be using and from there it went on to explain, in short, why I should never let BamBam! go: think of it like it’s Megazord from Power Rangers, with the individual Zords coming together to accomplish the original task.

For the part that required time tracking I was able to add Chime which is free, Anchor for wiki, and the developers state that it can also integrate Springloops right now and the option of messages and notes for teams via Turbine is currently in the works. I also found that there’s an option to import already created tasks in CSV or XLS format.

With a clean, minimalist design and feel coming in by default, the one thing I really liked is that it can be changed. BamBam! is extremely customizable, not only in look but also in everything else, from privacy to the degree of minutia provided. As a project manager, I could see on my news feed everything that was going on but somebody that’s only testing or proofing for the project can opt for a simplified table view for clarity.

The how much (and conclusion)

I would urge anybody that feels that their project or team could use some beating into shape to go ahead and try it out right now on dobambam.com because up to 10 users are free of charge and then it’s a mere $7 per user if the project requires more members than that. Storage and projects are not an issue because they’re also free and that alone lead me to conclude that BamBam! does indeed offer the full package.