How Prolex Media Made Productive the Backbone of Their Agency Operations

I’d say it’s got to be Resourcing and Project Management. Scheduling was a real pain with Monday and Productive made things so much easier, especially since Gantt charts were released. Being able to allocate time per task was a big deal for me since I could finally see how much time each person is spending on a project and how much capacity we have.

Another thing we loved were project templates. Most of our projects are similar and having to write out the entire 150 step process each time we do a new project is just inefficient. With templates we can be sure we have everything we need and that nothing got missed while we were working on the project. Tasks just tie everything together so nicely, there’s a real depth to them. You can turn projects into boards, lists, tasks and it just tickles the right parts of my brain.

It made collaboration a lot easier. There’s no need to ping people and ask for project updates, we can just check what the project status is in Productive and who’s currently working on which task. I don’t have to go around and micro-manage things, I know what’s due and when and I just have to see if it’s finished.

We also love the ability to invite our clients into the projects. It takes the middle man out of the equation, no need to go back and forth via e-mail, we can get all of the feedback within Productive. It’s great to have the ability to have your project managers and clients talk directly and not having to worry about catching up on emails at 8PM. This also let’s the client see how much work is actually going into the project and you can see that they have a greater appreciation for what we do.

I’m very much a numbers guy and seeing all the reports on profitability, capacity and availability helps me figure out what the next logical hire would be, which is huge. Before, I was guessing. I’d feel like we were busy and that would be it—we’re hiring. Now I know if we can afford another staff member, which gaps we’re trying to cover with this hire, and what kind of responsibilities should they have.

The main challenge for us was consolidating everything we needed into one tool. We were using six different tools at the time, and Productive really delivered on that note. You can imagine the amount of time and money we saved when we switched to using just one tool. It also made the onboarding a lot easier, since people didn’t have to bounce around from tool to tool to track time or check budgets.

The onboarding process was probably less complicated than I thought it would be. The whole experience was great, our account manager was fantastic and you Support was terrific and answered questions quickly.

I think not being able to rely on Productive would be really frustrating, I would have a lot more questions for my team and would be bugging them more often.

In terms of a favorite feature, I don’t think I can really single anything out. I think for me, what makes Productive great, is the fact that it’s an all-in-one tool. It answers all of my questions and I can do everything within one tool to see how my company’s doing, business-wise. I couldn’t imagine switching to a different tool.

Productive really brought peace of mind, transparency, analytics and easier management of my team.