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I work in a virtual office environment, meaning I work from home and communicate with my co-workers via chat and online communication tools that allow us to collaborate on projects easily and in real time. We use Basecamp along with activeCollab but there are open source projects that can be used if a monthly subscription is not within your budget. Whatever project management tool you use, keep in mind there are three must haves in getting the most out of your collaborative: time management, milestone tracking and effective communication.

Just for the sake of ease as it is what I am most familiar with, I’m going to use BasecampHQ as my example but you should be able to incorporate these tactics in any project management tool be it subscription-based or an open source alternative to Basecamp, ActiveCollab or what have you.

For team collaboration in a virtual office setting, it doesn’t get any better than Basecamp. It’s a simple web-based collaboration tool that lets you easily communicate essential project management goals, including managing multiple projects, task managing, milestone tracking, group messaging and file uploading. There is nothing to download and nothing to install to get started. Is it the best tool? Maybe not, but it offers add-ons to make it complete. The most effective part of Basecamp is communication.

Effective communication is vital for a collaborative project. The group I work with, Merry Fools, is in constant communication with one another via BasecampHQ. It allows us to streamline our tasks so that we can knock out projects efficiently. The source of our communication is derived mostly from daily email. Keep in mind we also use a chat room to maintain real time communication but as a review of the day’s events, the email communique keeps us in the know where everyone is on a particular project so that we can refer to each team member’s email as needed. This allows us to direct any relative inquiries on a project to the appropriate team member as we have many projects in the works at the same time.

Milestone tracking is another essential for project collaboration. This falls under task management and gauges progress of a given task within a project usually. We use milestone tracking to set goals and maintain work flow and to mark completion of deliverables for client billing. You have to have milestones if you want to achieve timely work flow. This gets everyone on the same page so that you can coordinate tasks. Basic milestone tracking includes project dashboards, task calendars and Gantt charts, which are used to illustrate project schedules graphically.

Finally, you need to have a way to track an individual’s time on a project. This is important when illustrating billing to clients and also acts as an employee time card. Time tracking helps you develop a standard for task management and develop a timeline for completion on a project. There are many applications out there that let you track time. Too many, in fact, to list here. In our virtual office we use the TimeThis desktop app. It’s a cross-platform time-tracking tool for Mac, Windows and Linux that lets you create tasks from inside the app without having to open your browser. For Basecamp, open source and ActiveCollab projects it’s an indispensable add-on. There is a one-off fee to use it but it’s well worth the cost.

For best project management practices these are the essentials for your online collaboration. Sure there are add-ons that can boost your efficiency, but you have to start with the big three listed here to get tasks under way effectively for proper client accountability.