What's Up Interactive Increases Productivity by 50 Percent and Dramatically Improves Corporate Collaboration by Using Clarizen
What’s Up Interactive is an Atlanta-based interactive marketing agency offering interactive and media-related services on behalf of its clients. The scope of What’s Up’s projects includes building web sites, producing videos, developing mobile applications and creating social media strategies. The company enjoys a diverse portfolio of clients including Coca-Cola and Georgia Lottery; client relationships are both single-project based as well as long-term project based.
What’s Up is a dynamic and creative agency that employs 25 workers with a wide spectrum of disciplines. Within its project management process the company describes two main challenges.
The first challenge relates to cross-departmental collaboration within a single project. Each project has a varied group of team members whose individual contribution can directly affect the project as a whole. From designers to front-end/back-end developers to video producers – everyone must come together and keep lines of communication open for the project to be successful.
The second challenge relates to managing a steady workload of roughly 15-20 different projects at any given time. For each project, every client defines a goal that must be met. As a company, What’s Up is committed to reaching this goal, surpassing the client’s expectations and delivering on time, as scheduled. With 15-20 projects running simultaneously, What’s Up management must be in full control over workload, production and project deadlines.
Originally, What’s Up was using a variety of project management solutions including MS Project, Merlin, Excel spreadsheets, and even updating work schedules by hand. The team was frustrated and expressed a need to find something more fitted to their needs.
Manager of Client Support Malenka Warner says, "We had a great team, talented and smart individuals but the effort that it was taking to manage all our projects was just not working. That’s what brought us to look for different solutions, 15-20 solutions to be exact. Then we narrowed it down to three, two, and finally to Clarizen."
Criteria for What’s Up project management solution included: an online solution; ease-of-use for everyone (suitable to a wide range of disciplines within the team); and a solution that followed the interactive company’s internal project management methodology. The decision was narrowed down to two options, @task and Clarizen. Although @task was the veteran in the bunch, it was also recognized that one of the greater challenges for What’s Up would be integration of the solution.
We asked ourselves, What’s going to happen a month from now if we run into problems? How will that be handled? Well, [Clarizen] totally knocked that one out of the park."Malenka Warner explains,"What we saw with Clarizen is that even though the company hasn’t been around as long as the other guys, Clarizen has a very sound integration and support program so any one of our employees could visit a webinar online and get the support they need."
With Clarizen, What’s Up was able to easily integrate the project management solution for all of its employees, regardless of their discipline. The company is also using Clarizen as a tool for fine-tuning their methods for project delivery. With so much built-in complexity in the agency’s processes, Clarizen has helped What’s Up outline and streamline all the project workflows and monitor the progress of each project as it happens in real-time. The solution has also acted as a mirror by demonstrating the strengths of the What’s Up team, as well as areas where improvements are needed.
It was something we knew about before, but now we can actually see how our teams work together. [Clarizen] improves our work approach; we’re working smarter,"Malenka Warner says."Clarizen has helped us be hyper focused on project scope in a real time manner which has allowed us to realize a 50% increase of delivering all our projects at-or-under scope."