How to Achieve Optimal Agency Efficiency - A Use Case

Common Business Challenges for Agencies

For digital marketing agencies, business challenges often crop related to planned resources, time tracking, and integration with different platforms in use. Interviewing Tangible Value, we zeroed in on some common challenges faced across managers and resources— figuring out how to:

-Ability to plan time tracking with visual output, both into the future and against actual hours spent on projects.

-Quickly identify when resources are over leveraged, allowing for quick shifts in workforce allocation so the business can run at optimal scale.

-Easy integration with Project Management tools and Current Calendars. The agency was specifically working with Asana along with Google Calendar, and wanted a time tracking and resource allocation solution that would work with their current workflow.

-Improving business operations and procedures. A million things can be in the air at the same time, managing numerous client and project priorities. Making time to outline improvements for overall business operations and procedures often should be prioritized — but, all too often, fall on the back burner.

Implementing Solutions for Agencies: Good Questions to Ask

Before implementing a time tracking technology solution that can help boost productivity, consider the following:

-How easily does it integrate with solutions already in use? If you're already using some other platforms, such as Asana for project management and Google Calendar, finding a solution that works seamlessly with these applications is key. That way, they can plug into your current workflow without the need to jump back and forth between applications.

-How intuitive yet flexible is it to use, and is a trial an option? Buy-in and adoption are top considerations when looking at the longer term use and success of a new technology solution that is to be used at an agency. Ideally, your teams can start with a trial, ramp up usage/adoption, and ask questions or remove roadblocks to prevent a full roll out.

-What is the learning curve for rolling the solution out to team members? Onboarding new users and learning how to use feature sets requires extra time. Ideally, a solution set is rich yet easy enough for anyone to pick up and adopt easily without a big learning curve.

-How often are customer requested features implemented? Software needs to keep up with the fast changing needs of its customers. Find out how the company stacks up by reviewing their product roadmap or release schedule. Also see what current customers have to say, along with feedback on responsiveness of the support team.

The Results: Easily Review future and past projects for optimal efficiency

With the help of the right time tracking solution, Tangible Value was able to achieve the following results:

Looking for complete case studies on how different agencies, teams, and independent contractors are able to improve on their business efficiencies and gain transparency with the right visual tool? Stay tuned, we'll be posting full use case stories soon on hourstack.com.