The Challenge
Visit Greater Palm Springs (VGPS) uses Basecamp to manage projects, assignments, and cross-department collaboration — but its built-in reporting has a critical blind spot. Two independent teams tackled the same problem at the Vibe-a-thon and built fully working tools in 24 hours.
⚠️ The Problem
Basecamp's only overdue view is a single undifferentiated list combining every late item across all departments and projects. Managers wanting overdue-by-department, aging breakdowns, or unassigned task visibility had to run manual person-by-person reports — creating blind spots and extra hours of work every week.
🔨 What Was Built
A live Basecamp intelligence dashboard — VGPS Pulse — connected directly to the VGPS Basecamp account via API. Built with 10 modules in 24 hours.
📈 Business Impact
Saved per manager / week
No more manual person-by-person Basecamp report runs
Overdue items surfaced
Of 78 live to-dos across 3 projects; 21 are critical at 30+ days. Invisible in Basecamp's default flat list.
Departments tracked
Every sub-department gets its own scorecard — something Basecamp never provided
Custom report generation
What took an hour of manual pulling now takes a few clicks
Proactive manager briefings
Morning + evening briefs delivered automatically — no login required
Bottleneck detection
Aging buckets & reason codes let leadership intervene before escalation
🗺️ What's Planned Next
⚠️ The Problem
Basecamp's built-in reporting only shows a single undifferentiated list of all overdue to-dos across every project and department. No way to view overdue items by department, identify aging tasks at a glance, or surface unassigned to-dos — creating blind spots and hours of manual report-building every week.
🔨 What Was Built
BasecampPulse — a Streamlit dashboard deployed on Railway, pulling live data from the Basecamp 3 API with Google sign-in authentication and an AI manager briefing toggle powered by Claude.
