The Business Innovation Consulting Group (BICG) designs new work solutions and strategies to help companies improve their internal work processes. With offices in Spain, Germany, France and Mexico, BICG caters to companies all over the globe. For almost three years now, they’ve been using Productive as their main business management tool. We visited their HQ in Madrid to talk about their experience with Productive and how it’s supported their growth.

Joaquín D., CTO: We wanted to improve the work that we were already doing, the internal processes that were already taking place. We were looking for a tool that would let us easily track the time we dedicated to each project, that would let us organize tasks within each project, without being complex, and that would help us foresee the future: the workload that we would have in a few months. It also had to be a tool and a supplier that we trusted.

Carlos L., Managing Director: We were searching across the globe for different sorts of solutions and we came across Productive, and it has really been a very significant game-changer for us. There’s a before and after since we have been using Productive.

Joaquin D., CTO: It’s easier to track time when working on projects if I can better coordinate my team’s tasks with the rest of the organization.

Stephan O., Manager: We go through our team and see our workload for the next week or even for the next month, or for the next three months, and then we can schedule our people accordingly. Before we had a lot of Excel sheets, or people were doing this in PowerPoint or Word. They were not in one place and data wasn’t extractable from one place.

Ana G., Executive Financial Officer: I can safely say that finance and administration is one of the areas that has experimented the biggest change since the implementation of Productive.

The improvement in the efficiency of the processes and the even greater knowledge of our business is clear if you also take into account that you can treat each client, even each project from a client, as an independent unit of profitability.

Without a doubt, in the billing area there has been considerable change. I can say that the hours we dedicate have been reduced in a 15-20%.

Stephan: Productive really helped us and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested and who runs projects because it helps you to be more efficient. And that also comes down to the monetary aspects where, you say, you save money in the end of the day and you save your time. You make your life more easy, your work more easy. And that is a great benefit from Productive.

Ana: You can also do a follow up of the whole project, in line with the use of resources you have budgeted, you can quantify any type of deviation that happens, I wouldn’t say in real time, but you can see it day-to-day. All of this lets you make decisions faster and change the course of the project. For me, these are all qualities to highlight in Productive, because they contribute to make your business better.

Verónica F., PMO: The good thing about the tool is that having everything integrated in the same platform gives us a 360 view of how the company is performing regarding resources, efficiency, profitability. It helps the managers to self-manage, and allows us to have an immediate view of our resources, the project timing…

Before Productive, we were using different time tracking tools such as Clocking IT. The problem was that they didn’t completely fulfill our needs and the UX was really bad. We were also using a whiteboard in the office for weekly planning.

Finally, we found Productive, tested it, and started using it. It covered everything we needed at the time. Our goal was to find a tool that would give us a chance to track time on projects and manage tasks. All the extra features were just a bonus for us!

From a team perspective, we were searching for a way to have a better point of view on how busy our team members were because it has an impact on planning. On the other hand, we were trying to automate profitability data since we were growing. We were using spreadsheets and Excel documents at the time, but we didn’t have profitability data available in real time. This was a major benefit we experienced after switching to Productive: using it to see profitability for specific projects and to be able to check out our revenue.

With Productive, everything was quite logical from the start. Your Sales Manager visited us for an onboarding session during which he presented all the aspects of the platform and its features. He taught us how to create new project budgets, add team members… The whole onboarding process was smooth and easy.

It’s happened before. Not to me, but to my colleague. With Productive we get reminders, and it would be hard to overlook it. 

Yes, it was a lot of paperwork between project managers.

Yeah, before it was more complicated and time-consuming. We were using spreadsheets and you had to be strict about updating the information on budgets and issued invoices. There were a lot of post-its and printed papers. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if there had been more active projects. Now, when we deliver a project, we just create an invoice in the app, send it, and then close the project. No extra time needed.

That’s a good question. Since I got here, we were tracking time. We’ve always wanted to know how profitable our projects are.

We did some calculations to tell us our billable costs, internal costs, and overhead before. But not in real time.

From a managerial point of view, the main benefit of the tool is seeing your profitability in real time. It’s there. We don’t have to calculate it or ask for financial reports from our accountant. 

Having a complete overview of projects, open tasks, team occupancy, and profitability—it makes project management so much easier. Productive helps us be more flexible when working from home. It gives us a complete overview that we can reach from our phones.

We’ll probably stay a small team, maybe ten people at maximum. Our mission is to create user-oriented projects with added value. We hope to keep working on projects we really love.