Out with the Old, In with the New: Digital Project Management for Agencies
In October of 2017, the IN Food team embarked on a journey into previously uncharted territory. Years of keeping physical copies of projects (which had once worked so well), was now leading to overflowing review baskets, job jackets that had seen better days and hard-to-read handwritten mark-ups. We had to face it: our agency was growing and in need of a new project management system.
After months of research, training calls and internal testing, we were ready to take our project management digital. March 16, 2018 was dubbed “W-Day,” better known as the day we parted with job jackets and introduced “The Workamajig Way.”
Dancing the ‘jig
For those of you who aren’t familiar, Workamajig is a multifunctional, fully integrated project management system made specifically for advertising agencies and in-house creative teams. Their latest edition, Platinum, allows users to manage project details, creative resourcing and reporting in one place. Read on for a closer look at 5 reasons why we love Workamajig, or as we affectionately refer to it – the ‘jig.
1) Focusing on What’s Important
Less time spent tracking the status of projects, more time spent strategizing and thinking creatively! We find that when projects are streamlined in one place on Workamajig, we can put more thought and energy into going above and beyond for our clients.
2) Details, Details, Details!
Complex projects require a lot of communication. We love building multi-modal relationships with our clients: on-site meetings, phone calls, emails and Skype conferences – we do it all. But clear, dependable, consistent communication across many platforms comes a lot of nitty-gritty details. Workamajig allows us to store all of these details in one place, making it easy to reference them later. This helps keep team members on-track and on the same page.
3) Time Well-Spent
Through Workamajig, we’re able to track the number of hours we are putting into projects, our outside costs, our incremental costs – and everything in between. This is especially helpful when it comes to keeping projects on-budget. Recently, we began implementing a weekly budget analysis report through the ‘jig that allows us to see exactly where each project is at, financially speaking.
4) Happy creative team = Happy (Project Manager) Life
Nina, our project & traffic manager, prioritizes projects in the ‘jig to show our creative team what they need to tackle first. The creative team can then seamlessly route all projects through the system, collect feedback and upload final files upon approval.
5) Constantly Improving
The best thing about the ‘jig is the exceptional support behind the software. The Workamajig team is constantly making updates based on client feedback. In addition, we are frequently in touch with our Account Manager, Rod, who never fails to make solving complicated tech problems look easy.
Workamajig does incredible things for our team right now, and we haven’t even come CLOSE to hitting the ceiling with this software. In 2019, we’ll be honing-in on how to utilize the robust data and reporting to improve our processes and decision making. In an ever-changing industry, it’s important for us to stay ahead of the curve so that we can best serve our associates and clients. Streamlined software that makes everything run smoothly is simply one piece of what sets our agency apart.