How REDspace saved over $220,000 using Tempo
Tempo Team
REDspace, based out of Halifax, Canada, specializes in the design and development of web, mobile, gaming, and video solutions with major clients like Sony, Fox, IBM, and Nickelodeon.
They were having trouble with their financial reporting – the manual process was labor intensive and time-consuming, and it was hurting their decision-making process.
Tempo's tools were exactly what they needed to get reliable operating expenses, accurate timesheets, and compliance-ready reporting.
To discuss this success story and how REDspace used Tempo’s tools to revolutionize their time tracking and financial reporting, we spoke to Angela Campbell, REDspace’s project management office manager.
A time to change
In addition to the issues listed above, Campbell and the team noted that their planning cycles were short term, lacked adequate overview, and caused unnecessary friction between teams.
In more detail, the specific challenges were:
REDspace manually exported timesheets to a spreadsheet and performed their own financial calculations. This was time-consuming, prone to human error, and there was no way to ensure that the same labor costs were used across all calculations.
Data was manually manipulated within a spreadsheet, and each project manager using their own calculations, risks of error in data was high.
Resource planning was done via a shared spreadsheet, 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 responsible for communicating their upcoming weekly plans with team members, but struggled to communicate changes to every necessary stakeholder.
Difficulties in tracking time and utilization across multiple projects that were being worked on concurrently by the same resources.
The new tools of the trade
REDspace decided to implement three parts of the Tempo suite: Timesheets, Capacity Planner, and Financial Manager. A big decision factor was that Tempo is tightly integrated within Jira – a tool the team was already familiar with and fond of.
With Financial Manager, the REDspace team set up and categorized folios for each client proposal. Using the team’s estimates, they established an estimated cost of each project.
From this point onward, the team assigned team members to projects as well as 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 Financial Manager informs the executive team whether a project is on target, behind budget, or under/over-resourced.
When a project is kicked off, actions regarding resource planning need to be made. The project managers at REDspace use Capacity Planner to plan work for the team assigned to each project throughout its duration. With Capacity Planner, work can easily be updated during the course of the project as needs and requirements change.
Now, they can see in a single 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, Timesheets enabled the company to log all work directly within Jira and track all associated worklogs to specific projects.
REDspace used the timesheet approvals feature within 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.
What difference did Tempo make?
“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, Manager, Project Management Office
With Financial Manager, REDspace can now quickly report on the financial health of a project with a high degree of accuracy. Each project manager works with the same process and calculations when creating project budgets and monitoring them.
Prior to deploying Financial Manager, 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 five minutes. They can also run reports on budgets of all projects in progress – all at once.
REDspace also benefitted from a significant improvement in transparency since the implementation of Financial Manager, leading to better reporting for management and more informed decision making. Now, they have a much simpler process for identifying patterns and trends in their own projects as well as those of their clients.
Using Capacity 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 and there’s no longer a need to be informed by a manager.
Now, team members have direct access to their plans via Capacity Planner. That means less communication lag time and less confusion throughout the planning processes for REDspace’s teams and they can now identify cases where they won’t have the necessary resources required and trigger the recruitment process.
After implementing Capacity Planner, the teams at REDspace have been able to cancel expensive, time-consuming weekly project planning meetings, which have saved the company valuable time and resources.
Combined with Timesheets, REDspace has 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.
Interested in reading more? Find more of Tempo's success stories here.