How Giraffe Social Optimized Their Resource Planning With Productive
Giraffe Social is a creative agency helping some of the world’s most ambitious brands achieve meaningful results on social media by balancing strategic thinking with creative brilliance and a human-first approach.
We spoke with Kate Webster, Head of Operations at Giraffe, about how Productive helped them optimize their resource planning.
Productive allowed us to bring it all under one umbrella, which means we got a better picture of our business as a whole.
How did you come across Productive?
When I came to the company, we used Asana, which worked well regarding tasks. The thing we found lacking was resourcing. We manually processed our resource allocation, which was time-consuming and opened up more room for error.
We quickly realized that resourcing was becoming a big pain point for us. How do we know how long it will take to deliver this project? It’s just one of many questions we didn’t have an answer for. We integrated EverHour, but the learning curve was too steep, and we had to get the team used to time tracking. So, we decided to start looking for a solution that was an all-in-one tool.
It was unexpected that we managed to find a tool that allowed us to not only manage projects and tasks better but also allocate our resources and get an overview of our profitability. Productive allowed us to bring it all under one umbrella, which means we got a better picture of our business as a whole.
We Help Your Agency Reach New Heights
Switch from multiple tools and spreadsheets to one scalable agency management system.
We love your support team. Our team often comes to me with questions, and it’s really nice knowing I can rely on the support team to get things done. They’re efficient, super friendly, and thorough.
What was the transition like?
Our CEO was the primary driver behind choosing Productive. He did the initial demo and then a demo with the leadership team. We had Bernarda, one of your Business Development Representatives, guide our hands through the entire process. We decided it would probably be best to implement top-down so management would start using the tool first and then drive its usage to other team members.
We onboarded our team to project management first so that they could get comfortable and start exploring other things in the tool.
We love your support team. Our team often comes to me with questions, and it’s really nice knowing I can rely on the support team to get things done. They’re efficient, super friendly, and thorough.
Do you have any favorite features?
I spend a lot of my time in the Resourcing tab. I’m trying to make sure that we’re maximizing billable time, that there’s no underutilization, and that our teams’s time is well spent between client work and internal work. Resourcing in Productive allows me to understand if the team has time to contribute to other things. From the team’s perspective, they have much more clarity about how much time they should spend on clients.
We changed our business model from packages to retainers, and Productive really helped with that. With Productive’s Resourcing, I can be sure that I’m never allocating more work to the team than they can actually do in a week based on working hours.
I feel like once we’ve put enough data into Productive, it’s going to help us strengthen and grow our business in the future.
Achieve Your Agency’s True Potential
Switch from multiple tools and spreadsheets to one scalable agency management system.
