Data From Productive Points Agency RLYL in the Right Direction
RLYL (Red Lorry Yellow Lorry) is an independent B2B tech, PR and marketing agency. Simply putting it: their goal is to get their clients where they want to be. RLYL has offices in London, Paris, Berlin, Boston, LA and Austin. We spoke with Tristan Earl, Client Director about how Productive helped them better understand capacity and hiring needs.
Can you tell us about RLYL and your role there?
I actually started as a client of RLYL. I joined as an Account Director and after that I took on an operational role. I’m now the Client Director and I oversee how we deliver services to our clients. I make sure that we’re correctly resourced and trained and that we’ve got the right people doing the right kinds of jobs. We have offices across the world so we have to make sure we’re providing a consistent level of service. We also have to monitor which accounts are profitable and whether we’re over-servicing or under-servicing our accounts.
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What made you switch to Productive?
We used Harvest before we found Productive. We used it to track time and then we’d manually create reports from that. We had a homemade Excel spreadsheet that we used for capacity planning. As you could imagine, this wasn’t the easiest way of doing things. We came to realize that once we really started growing during the pandemic and had to onboard a lot of people remotely.
We’re always looking to give the best quality service to our clients and we felt that some sort of agency management tool would give us a greater understanding of how busy our people were and whether they have time to take on more work. We wanted a more analytical approach in terms of staffing our teams. We started looking at a few different tools before we decided to go with Productive.
We’re able to see the reality of how much someone has worked compared to how much we think they should have worked. This helps us with workload management.
What features do you use the most?
We use Productive to understand team capacity and monitor client servicing levels. Once we set up a new project, we allocate people that’ll work on the project and then we schedule their work. We don’t want to know what people are doing on Tuesday, we want to know how much time they’ll spend on project X and project Y. We tend to schedule work by month for a period of 6 months, so we’re always looking a month ahead.
Each job level has an hourly rate and once the scheduling is done, people can track time on projects they’re working on. We’re able to see the reality of how much someone has worked compared to how much we think they should have worked. So, Productive helps us with workload management.
Once the month is over, we go into Insights and look at how the monthly budget was split between services. So feature-wise, I’d say we mostly use Scheduling, Time Tracking, Projects, Sales and Insights.
The data we get points us in the right direction. If something looks odd, then it’s worth investigating. We became more inquisitive about how things are run.
What benefits did you see after switching to Productive?
The data that Productive shows us is great. It did take some time to set things up, but I’d say we’d struggle had it not been for the data we’ve now got. The data is really transformative in the way that it gave us an understanding of how busy our people were. This also impacted our hiring decisions.
The data we get points us in the right direction. If something looks odd, then it’s worth investigating. We became more inquisitive about how things are run. We really have the ability to dig down into whatever we want – which, in turn, helps us understand our business better.
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