Joi Polloi’s Teammates Have More Autonomy Since Using Productive

Jason: What was important for us was to do an audit of what we were using and consolidate them in a way that we use fewer tools and get better data. The key metrics for any agency are: how busy are the people? How are we doing with bringing in new work? How are we budgeting that work? How are we forecasting further down the road for new work? From a delivery point of view, our job is keeping people busy, and that’s by getting new work in and seeing it successfully delivered.

Melodie: Leads and opportunities were handled quite differently. With Podio, it was a lot of changing between views and there was a real lack of anything concrete in terms of TODOs. From our Monday morning meetings to the following week, nothing would have really happened. 

What’s been good in Productive is assigning people to TODOs on sales activities. A lot of projects we pitch for are very complicated and not just sticking a quote together. You need a full creative response and a full technical response. Being able to delegate roles based on opportunities has probably been the most effective thing in Productive. It gives more accountability to people and a clear direction of what their role in the particular opportunity is. Whereas before, I think we lost out on a lot of opportunities because we weren’t proactive.

It’s been great for really quick stuff with clients, like being able to use the quoting tool to be able to put together a new proposal, and of course, turning a won deal into a project.

Melodie: Yes. One of the key things it’s shown me was that we need to be more realistic when setting up our budgets.

Jason: I’m not sure that there were surprises, but they confirmed our worst suspicions. It’s really helpful to see the budget you get for a piece of work and the actual amount of time spent on that piece of work. Whether that’s a cost to the business or something we’ll charge to the client—the evidence is plain to see for work that is underestimated.

Jason: I wouldn’t say that we changed services rates that much, but we figured out where we need to improve our estimating or be more rigorous with clients on what they’re getting for their money because obviously, you don’t want to overrun every project.

Jason: I think the process is a lot clearer and more focused than before. Working remotely, we work with producers, developers, designers that aren’t collaborating in person anymore. Having most of our communication flow through Productive has improved efficiency because it’s all in one place.

We’re not reinventing project management, but what we have done is refined our processes to make it easier for people to get what they need at the right point. From a producer’s perspective, it’s been really helpful to be able to see the project management side of things in Productive, as well as the financials and the end-to-end: sales to projects and delivery cycle as well.

Melodie: Productive has given the team a lot more autonomy. Before, in Asana, it was much more a developer working on a ticket and handing it back to a project manager, and not so much focused on accountability. I’m very keen on agile processes and I think Productive helps us be more accountable by reassigning tasks to different team members. Now our developers have more autonomy in their involvement in projects.

Also, the ability to log time directly against a task that was just done instead of going through the week and trying to backtrack how much time was spent on what has improved our efficiency. 

Both: Yeah, we have!

Jason: We’ve had to get used to working remotely and we’ve experimented a lot: daily stand-ups, end-of-the-day stand-ups, catching up as an agency, or for certain projects.  Being able to get together with the team, share screens and project boards, and check up on the status of tasks as you would do in person while working remotely has been very useful. The moment you start to stray from a shared resource, you don’t have everyone on the same page. Keeping everything recorded in Productive has been very helpful. 

Melodie: Productive has definitely helped with estimating time. It also comes with the accountability that I was talking about earlier. Before our teammates might have given an estimate and they didn’t really see how those hours were being used. I think it helps them get a lot better at how they’re estimating hours because they’ve got that full accountability now. That, in turn, helps us. 

As producers, we have two strings of projects: actual projects and retained support or maintenance for clients. With retainers, we’ve got a lot more fixed costs, so the reporting has been a lot more accurate now. We can look at things and say: “We’ve estimated that much time for that task and the clients have been burning through the budget a lot faster than we initially thought.” It’s helping us be a lot more efficient on that side.

Jason: I think a lot of the data we had before wasn’t accurate or we didn’t have the data that was required so you couldn’t run any reports from it. When I look at the utilization reports since we’ve started using Productive, they do show a slow increase because people have been getting used to tracking time. It’s really helpful not only to see how busy people are but how busy they are on billable work. 

The forecasting report is really helpful as well because it shows what our budget is, what our profit margin is likely to be, and what we need to do to keep a project healthy. Forecasting is something that I believe will only grow and become more accurate. 

Jason: Yes. If I had to choose the main benefit of switching to Productive, it would be having visibility of everything in one place: from sales through resources, projects, to delivery, plus the time logging and profitability figures in one place—being able to track the end-to-end lifecycle of a project.   

Melodie: I don’t know how we’d work through the first lockdown if we had been using our old method!