REDspace is a young company based out of Halifax, Canada, specializing in the design and development of web, mobile, gaming, and video solutions. They have long-term relationships with a variety of large clients, with each of whom they have worked on dozens of projects.
Challenges
Before turning to the Tempo suite, the REDspace team manually exported their team members' timesheets to a spreadsheet and performed their own calculations to discern the financial health of their projects. In this process, there was no way to ensure that the same labour costs were used across all calculations. With data being manually manipulated within a spreadsheet, and each project manager using their own calculations, risks of error in data was high.
Resource planning within the company was also done via a shared spreadsheet, which the project management team contributed to and reviewed on a weekly basis. This process lent itself to short-term planning, with conflicts often arising between managers for the same resources. Managers were also responsible for communicating their upcoming weekly plans with team members; however, plans often needed to change quickly, which required further communication and led to disruption within teams.
The REDspace team also experienced difficulties in tracking time and utilization across multiple projects that were being worked concurrently by the same resources.
To sum it up, financial reporting generated for the executive team was manual, often difficult to work with, labour intensive, and time consuming. This led to ill-informed and delayed decision making. Planning cycles were short term, lacked adequate overview, and caused unnecessary friction between teams. Additionally, time tracking was difficult and it was challenging to optimize resource utilization.
Solution
The REDspace teams decided to implement the whole Tempo suite: Tempo Timesheets, Tempo Planner, and Tempo Budgets. A big decision factor was that Tempo is tightly integrated within Jira – a tool the team was already familiar with and fond of.
With Tempo Budgets, the REDspace team has easily set up and categorized folios for each client proposal. Using the team’s estimates, they establish an estimated cost of each project.
From this point onward, the team assigns team members to the project as well as the adding the final expected revenue using Tempo Budgets. By doing this, REDspace has enabled project managers to monitor the health of a project over its lifecycle. The data from Tempo Budgets informs the executive team whether a project is on target, behind budget, or under/over resourced.
When a project is kicking off, actions regarding resource planning need to be made. The project managers at REDspace use Tempo Planner to plan work for the team assigned to each project throughout its duration. With Tempo Planner, work can easily be updated during the course of the project as needs and requirements change. They see at a glance the plans created and availability for departments within the company – whether it’s design, web development, or QA.
Once a project has been completed, they close the project folio and run a full analysis of how the project performed financially. This is all accomplished within Tempo Budgets, which allows REDspace to store the data for future reference.
Finally, Tempo Timesheets has enabled the company to log all work directly within Jira and track all associated worklogs to specific projects. Furthermore, REDspace uses the timesheet approvals within Tempo Timesheets where team members submit their timesheets to their managers. By doing this, the company can ensure that their team members are entering time for accurate customer billing and/or payroll purposes.
Benefits
“Since implementing the Tempo suite, the REDspace team has estimated cost savings of over $220,000 CDN or $25,000 per Project Manager annually.” Angela Campbell
With Tempo Budgets, each Project Manager works with the same process and calculations when creating project budgets and monitoring them. REDspace can now quickly report on the financial health of a project with a high degree of accuracy. Prior to Tempo Budgets, checking the amount of budget spent to date on a project could take hours, now it takes a minute, and setting up a budget can be done in as little as 5-10 minutes. They can also run reports on budgets of all projects in progress, all at once.
REDspace is benefiting from a significant improvement in transparency since the implementation of Tempo Budgets, leading to better reporting for management and more informed decision making. They now easily identify patterns and trends in their own projects as well as those of their clients.
Using Tempo Planner has allowed project managers and department heads to plan out time for staff for the duration of a project. Team members are now aware of their allocations as their planned time is available to them. There’s no longer a need to be informed by a manager. Instead, team members have direct access to their plans via Tempo Planner. This makes for less communication lag time and less confusion throughout the planning processes. What’s more, they can now identify cases where they won’t have the necessary resources required and trigger the recruitment process.
After implementing Tempo Planner, REDspace has been able to cancel expensive, time-consuming weekly project planning meetings, which have saved the company valuable time and resources.
Combined with Tempo Timesheets, REDspace have been able to do all of their work in Jira and Tempo, giving them one central location for tracking all projects, tasks, and hours. This has helped them enforce proper weekly time logging, associating the correct hours to the right projects easily.
Background
Based out of Bedford, Canada, REDspace is a full-service digital studio specializing in web, mobile, gaming, and video solutions and working with leading brands including Nickelodeon, FOX, Sony, IBM, and Turner. They craft digital experiences that help empower brands, connecting their content with their audiences. Their award-winning design and development services are amongst the best in North America.
For this customer success story, we interviewed Angela Campbell, Project Management Office Manager at REDspace on how her organization uses Tempo's Jira time tracking software and resource management software to help with their Project Management.
Interested in reading more? Find more of Tempo's success stories here.
