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How PortMA stays organized with Portfolio Manager

How Portfolio Manager become the tool of choice for a market research firm
From Team '23

Tempo Team

About PortMA

PortMA, or Portland Marketing Analytics, is a market research firm that specializes in the measurement and analysis of event marketing return-on-investment and advertising communication. In this work, they service a number of marketing and advertising agencies in the U.S. with design, data collection, analysis, and reporting services, doing anywhere from 50 to 70 projects per year in a wide range of industries.

Challenge

PortMA's remote workers need to stay organized when there are a ton of complex projects running at the same time.

“We outgrew Basecamp. As that platform advanced, it moved away from what we needed," said Chris Clegg, president of PortMA. "At the core, we needed templates, task dependencies, resource planning, and risk management tools. Portfolio Manager fit the bill on all fronts and has shown us a number of additional features we didn’t know we needed. We’re a better, stronger business because of what Portfolio Manager allows us to do.”

Solution

Now the team works entirely from within Portfolio Manager.

“All of our internal and external project work is spec’d out in detail with time estimates, assignments, and work orders within the Portfolio Manager system," Clegg added. "And then our daily time tracking is submitted against Portfolio Manager tasks to help us monitor our progress against contract deliverable items in real-time.

Research managers and supporting staff are updating their projects and related tasks on a daily basis to keep things moving smoothly.

"At any given time, we might have 15 to 25 contracts running simultaneously, each with dozens of weekly task items. Without Portfolio Manager we’d be so lost in the weeds, we’d never get anything done," Clegg noted. "The flat resource planning model and how it defines deadline risks allows us to deal with reality and not bury staff under unreasonable deadlines."

Templates function as PortMA's playbook.

"We’ve built out detailed project templates with descriptions on what each task is, how it’s done, and why," said Clegg. "We’ve then added extensive checklist items to define the specifics of what is expected on a given task. This services as our documented corporate processes that allows for work to be quickly handed off from one person to another seamlessly without cutting corners.”

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