BCU’s swift growth is supported in part by its marketing department. Erin Macasek the Director of Integrated Marketing was charged with managing the increase in scope and size of the marketing team’s workload. She soon realized the need to move from self-management of projects to a project management software solution, choosing Workzone. 

Sarah Johnson, who had been with BCU for nearly two decades, joined the team as Marketing Project Specialist just as Workzone was being implemented. Having her as the point person was key as the team achieved success far beyond previous capacity. 

With the introduction of Workzone in the organization and the efficiencies it brings, BCU’s marketing team maximized their productivity, increasing their capacity for projects year over year.

“Having more than doubled the size of our department over nine years, and with that, the scope of the projects, the complexities of the projects, and the amount of deliverables, there’s absolutely no way we could ever manage without Workzone.”

– Erin Macasek, Director of Integrated Marketing

Using Workzone, BCU’s marketing department successfully went from completing 505 projects per year to 834 projects in 2019 — a 65% increase in productivity. Not only has Workzone made this expansion of service achievable, it is the consistent use of Workzone that provides the data to measure these victories.

The Challenge

Before Workzone, BCU’s marketing team was relying on an Excel spreadsheet as a master document to track project statuses and due dates. Marketing would receive requests for project updates via email, phone calls, and drop-in visits. This method led to hampered productivity, lack of transparency on project statuses, and, as the workload of this small team of six people grew, it became increasingly ineffective and inefficient.

Adding to the drag on productivity was their reliance on a hard copy system for proofing, complete with a blue cover sheet stapled to each item where team members could handwrite comments and sign off on their review. It worked until hard copies were misplaced, leading to a delay in productivity.

“I can’t tell you how many times we would forget who we gave it to, who had it last, and we’d be running around trying to find it.” – Erin Macasek

In 2014, all creative services were brought in-house and with the steady growth of BCU the team’s workload hit a tipping point. They began the search for a project management solution.

“We had no concept of how many projects we were working on. It was just kind of going by the day. We were just moving.” – Erin Macasek

The Solution

The marketing team at BCU knew they needed project management software that would allow them to track and move their work forward while also providing a record of data to help assess their staffing decisions. Enter Workzone.

Workzone gives the BCU marketing team reporting to show senior management how they are supporting BCU’s business goals and the tools they need to manage their projects, including: 

• Time Tracking – not just tracking time, but showing how long a project might take to complete.
• Project Templates – decreasing time spent on creating recurring projects
• Request Portal – allowing the team to accept new requests, organize and prioritize projects
• Notifications – offering time-saving email reminders when a project needs attention
• User Settings – allowing easy management of permissions and settings amongst different users
• Search Tool – providing ease in finding archived projects

A focus on onboarding and team-wide adoption with Workzone

The initial challenge of buy-in to use Workzone stemmed from the introduction of new processes, not only for the marketing team but for all internal teams initiating the requests. Adoption was ultimately achieved thanks to these six practices:

1. Make Workzone’s customization work for them
   Workzone’s success and support team worked with the marketing team to set up and customize the tool to the needs of the business. “Super fast response times.” – Sarah Johnson, marketing team member

2. Take the initiative with onboarding
   The marketing team ran training sessions for users, creating relevant guides to help them along the way. “I created a pdf user guide with screenshots and step by step directions to make it easy.” – Sarah Johnson 

3. Workzone is step one of the creative process
   The marketing team held firm on using Workzone to request new projects.”People were motivated because they knew we would only review the final details of a request with them in Workzone.” – Erin Macasek

4. Practice, practice, practice.
   They promoted regular use of Workzone. “It does become second nature once you’re working in Workzone a lot, so we would share that and how less stressful the process is after you take the leap.”  – Erin Macasek

5. Ingrain Workzone in the company’s culture
   The leaders became strong advocates of using Workzone. “We even talk about it in the interview process.” – Erin Macasek

6. Assign the role of Workzone expert in each team
   They trained power users. “One thing that other organizations should consider is having a “Workzone expert” on each team so that requests could filter through them. We’ve found it’s more efficient and effective that way.” – Erin Macasek

Workzone has become an invaluable tool. The team can’t imagine working without it. When asked how she would respond if the executive team decided to switch to another tool, Sarah Johnson, who manages Workzone for the marketing team replied, “I would probably start crying.”

“I think our turning point came at the one year mark when the data from using Workzone allowed us to show year over year improvements and shifts in our priorities to support the business goals. Because of Workzone and the visibility it provides, we really took off. Our team is able to complete so many more projects and demonstrate value far more than we could have before having Workzone in place.”

– Erin Macasek, Director of Integrated Marketing

Outcomes

The successful adoption of Workzone supports BCU’s continued growth.

Reduced redundancies

Requestors have the ability to duplicate requests. So, if they are routinely requesting similar projects or deliverables, they don’t have to rebuild an entire request.

Streamlining Partner Projects

The marketing team often produces campaigns and products co-branded with BCU and their partner organizations. Workzone enables the marketing team to handle the complexity of these projects without sacrificing oversight of their work as a whole.

Improved project estimates and time management

Once they captured enough data to better predict project hours, the team introduced capacity modeling. When requests come in, they can easily see who has the capacity to fulfill the request, based on current project allocations and estimated hours for the request. 

“We were finding that projects weren’t created equal, and we wanted to find a way to be able to differentiate between them and better understand why, and is our time being used wisely. So that’s where the time tracking really came into play.” 

– Erin Macasek

Departmental growth and increased productivity

Thanks to Workzone’s tracking and reporting, the marketing team had the data they needed to justify hiring additional staff. Workzone’s versioning control allows the marketing team to keep track of project changes and ensure compliance standards are met.

“Using Workzone has helped us triple our resources on the creative side. And I love the versioning tool, going back two or three revisions to see the progress of a piece.” 

– Erin Macasek

Greater transparency and communication

Thanks to Workzone, the marketing team can share with the BCU Branches, for example, that 30% of the team’s time is being spent on projects. 

“Some people have misconceptions about marketing, that everyone’s doing the same thing. It’s nice to show that within a design role they’re not sitting heads down designing all day. They’re part of strategizing and brainstorming and even some administrative time in meetings to understand the strategy and the direction. I think it serves a purpose even beyond productivity. It helps provide transparency around the complexity of our roles.”

– Erin Macasek

Takeaways

Since the successful adoption of Workzone, BCU was able to triple their creative team resources, take on more complex projects, and increase overall productivity by 65%. 

With the streamlined request process, the wealth of data captured, and increased transparency, they became more efficient and effective, while also strengthening the working relationships with their stakeholders. 

“We had no real means of demonstrating our value. With Workzone, we have hard data to show that we’re not a cost center, we are part of the strategic mission. Workzone has changed the game for marketing here at BCU.” 

– Erin Macasek, Director of Integrated Marketing

Is your team looking for a way to increase productivity and efficiency? Do you need a means of justifying growing your team to meet your goals? Workzone is here to help you collect the data, implement the processes, and create the efficiencies necessary for growing your business.  

This article originally appeared on the WorkZone Project Management Software blog.

TSTC’s marketing department started using Workzone in 2014. Workzone’s transparent project management platform provides time tracking, monitors workloads, tracks results, and provides expansive reporting. 

One of the added benefits of using Workzone is that TSTC has been able to use the integrated reporting to make the case for new hires and identify which teams need the most help. Nick Alvarado, the Vice President of Communications and Creative Services, shared that he has “been able to say: ‘Here’s what’s going on. Here are the number of projects that were completed last year, the year before, [and] the number of projects our employees are working on consistently. We need to fill these positions because we are drowning.’”

The Problem

Attracting top student talent while working within strict budgetary directives has resulted in growing pressure for communications and marketing departments at higher education institutions. TSTC’s marketing team was no exception. Challenged to justify the money proposed for their annual budget, they needed the tools to illustrate they were producing a positive return on investment with the funds they were allocated.

“When it comes to budget and ROI, the big question is always ‘Where is the value in your marketing efforts?’ We live in a data-driven society, and no one can just take your word for your word anymore.”

– Nick Alvarado, Vice President of Communications and Creative Services

The marketing team needed solid data to make a case for:

• Expanding their operational budget
• Hiring much-needed team members 
• Contracting out work to third-parties when necessary  
• Increasing compensation to help retain current employees 

The team was struggling to produce this data because of inconsistent processes and procedures. TSTC had four different marketing departments, spread across four different locations, serving 10 campuses in total. Each team had its own way of managing projects and tracking their work. Solutions ranged from pen and paper to Google documents and spreadsheets. 

With the disparity across groups, it was incredibly difficult to monitor and understand the progress of projects and the effectiveness of teams across departments. Leadership lacked consistent data and reports to generate these insights.

The Solution

TSTC’s marketing department needed a team-wide tool with standardized processes and reports that would allow them to gather and publish the data required to answer these two basic questions:

1. How do you justify your budget?
2. Where is the value in your marketing efforts? 

Nick understood that the first step in solving this problem was merging the separate marketing departments into one large, unified department and adopting an all-in-one system that could be used successfully across the board.

Workzone was TSTC’s tool of choice for two primary reasons:

1. It is a project management software built by marketers for marketers. “There are IT companies who develop project management systems that have tried to sell them to us, but they don’t fit what our needs are because they’re fit more towards IT,” Nick said. The tool contains the specific features that marketing teams at colleges and universities like TSTC need. 
2. It is an all-in-one project management solution that enables TSTC to successfully track and report on all projects coming through. This includes insight into who projects are being assigned to and where budgets are being allocated and spent. It also enables the team to monitor resource workloads and employee productivity.  

Knowing that adoption of a new tool and new processes would be a hurdle, Nick and the other executives focused on change management throughout the transition period.

Their change management strategy followed a three-pronged approach:

1. Leadership acted as strong spokespeople for the new system and processes, effectively promoting the change to their employees with a consistent message from the top. Nick shared that “it starts with leadership. You have to get them on board to support your process and make sure it’s trickled down for consistency. And they have to use the system. Our managers use this system during their meetings to review projects, timelines, workload, and more.”
2. The College involved all team members early on in the process to ensure they felt included and heard. Nick’s advice: “Get your team involved in customizing the solution — request forms, project templates, all of it. Make them part of the process not just with setting things up, but also in evaluating available tools so they can have buy-in from the beginning.”  
3. Leadership communicated why the system and its resulting data mattered, as well as how it would affect employees. “Show why this data matters. Show how productivity affects the budget and employee compensation. They don’t have to know the intricate details, but show them the big picture,” Nick said.

Outcomes

Thanks to the successful adoption of standardized processes, tools, and reports, TSTC has achieved the following positive outcomes:

70% increase in projects completed  

Since TSTC began using Workzone in 2014, they’ve seen a nearly 70 percent increase in projects completed yearly, now managing more than 4,000 each year. 

Using data from Workzone, TSTC has been able to tie productivity and efficiency to compensation, effectively incentivizing employees to take on more work. These insights also enabled them to ensure they were hiring the right roles for their team. 

“We’ve used Workzone to see how many projects someone has completed. When it comes time for somebody to ask for a raise, you can’t just say that someone worked hard. Where’s the data to back that up?”

– Nick Alvarado, Vice President of Communications and Creative Services

When your employees know that their reviews, their compensation, and the marketing department’s operational budget are all tied to project data, it’s much easier to motivate employees to take on additional work. 

Additional marketing hires where they’re needed most 

The marketing department has been able to secure additional hires and resources because of its ability to show a solid need. The new system enabled them to clearly illustrate how many hours employees are working on a regular basis as well as how many projects are being requested and completed. 

With the use of project reports, the TSTC marketing department could illustrate exactly how many positions they needed and which positions were in demand. “We initially planned to hire three graphic designers, but looking at our workload, we noticed a lot of video work coming in, so we changed one of those positions to a videographer,” Nick shared. 

TSTC was also able to assess exactly which resources they needed for optimum efficiency. For instance, by monitoring workloads, they realized there was no need for both a portal master and a webmaster. “We were able to combine that position and open up the resources to hire in another area.” 

The team was even able to convince administrators to end a year-long hiring freeze by providing the data which showed that more employees were needed to keep up with demand. 

Improved interdepartmental collaboration

Interdepartmental collaboration can be tricky. It can be difficult getting the right information at the right time without misunderstanding and delays. But, by adopting Workzone project request forms, the marketing department is now able to extract the exact data they need from requesters with little to no back-and-forth. 

By regularly sharing this project data with the other departments, there is an increased university-wide understanding of the marketing team’s bandwidth. Nick said, “Our collaborators know now how time-strapped we are, and many have improved communication.” 

With historical tracking and changes captured within the system, the marketing team can better monitor and understand who is responsible for what. There is also less risk of miscommunication, as tasks and notes can be tracked in one central location.  

By documenting everything in one system, it’s easier for everyone who is involved to stay up-to-date on what is going on and to ensure that nothing critical is missed. Plus, it becomes easy to pinpoint where communication breakdowns occur and to understand what has and hasn’t been completed. 

“In the past, there had been a couple of times where something has come across my desk, and it’s questioned by either the chancellor’s office or a vice-chancellor, ‘Where did this come from?’, ‘Who said this?’, ‘Why is this late?’, or ‘Why didn’t this get out on time?’ And we’ve had to, in the past, shuffle through emails, go through written notes — stuff like that — to try to find out who dropped the ball. But with Workzone it’s all in one place.” – Nick Alvarado, Vice President of Communications and Creative Services

A boost in employee morale and recognition 

Awards can now be tied directly to employee contributions, resulting in team members being recognized and rewarded. “This past year we had four people out of my team get awarded the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence for employees who’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty,” Nick said. 

With increased interdepartmental collaboration and visibility across the organization, several of their staff members were nominated for the award. “I got some direct questions saying, ‘So and so said this about the employee. Can you give me more details?’ ”  

Instead of providing generic praise, Nick was able to provide specifics on what had been accomplished: “I was able to say, ‘Caitlin has worked on a redesign of our graduation programs, and I know she’s worked a lot on our student activities calendars. The things that are the big monsters that nobody wants to deal with, she dealt with.’ All that’s tracked in Workzone, showing that she’s done that and the type of work that she’s done.”

Takeaways

Through the successful adoption of Workzone, the TSTC is able to gather and share all of the necessary data to run a productive marketing team, communicate the value of their efforts, and make a case for additional resources. 

With the data gained from Workzone, the marketing team can consistently illustrate the department’s return on investment and support its annual budget, effectively resolving the problem they faced and gaining advantages far beyond what the team initially hoped. 

One last piece of advice from Nickis: “Answer the simple question, ‘What am I trying to accomplish?’ For us, it was to integrate one project management system that can be used across multiple campuses across Texas, so everyone knew what was going on. And once we got that, we were able to fine-tune and discover so much more data that was available to us.” 

Is your team facing pressure to support your budget and prove your worth? If so, Workzone can help you collect the necessary data and present it to your stakeholders in a meaningful way.   

Request a demo today to learn more about how Workzone can help your higher education marketing team track your resources and justify your operational budget.

This article originally appeared on the WorkZone Project Management Software blog.

Amy Elias came to Legacy Health in 2017 to serve as the system’s Creative Projects & Systems Manager. After spending years at a Fortune 500 company where no project management tool was in place, she was excited that Legacy Health had invested in Workzone. There was one catch. Hardly anyone at Legacy Health was using it.

Amy became the Workzone champion. Her practical, methodical approach and collaboration with Workzone’s customer success team led to her team members having a different view of using Workzone. They soon began to see its value in improving their workflows and demonstrating the ROI of their team. 

“Workzone has allowed us to show the work that we’re doing for each hospital and the system as a whole. We’ve made huge strides and it’s clicking for these team members. They now realize, ‘I want my work to show up on a report so the hospital president knows I’m working hard for them.”

Amy Elias, Creative Operations Manager

The Challenge

One of the main aspects of Amy’s role at Legacy Health was to be the subject matter expert on Workzone. Her challenge? Achieve buy-in and full adoption of Workzone throughout Legacy Health’s marketing and community relations departments.

Presented with a classic case of “It’s working, so why change it?” Amy knew that the opposite was true. 

Lack of an established project management process resulted in:

• Inefficient processes wasting valuable time and assets
• Uncertainty about what projects and tasks teams are spending their time on
• Stakeholder communications were falling through the cracks

The Solution

This level of buy-in requires a cultural shift. Legacy Health had the advantage of a new CEO with a visionary view of leadership; she understood that collaborative use of a project management platform like Workzone had the potential for system-wide positive transformative change. 

Amy planned to tackle one area at a time, using Workzone to manage the projects of her 35-person team in the community relations and marketing department. She recommends starting with easy, bare-bones tasks. 

She shared that, “It’s all about starting that routine and setting the expectation that you need to update the system. Once people became comfortable with it, we were able to build on that, adding dependencies and using the platform more completely.”

The challenges Legacy Health was facing demonstrate the value of Workzone’s customer success teams. Amy worked with Workzone’s Director of Customer Success, Alex, whose team plays a key role in helping teams adopt new project management habits for the long term. Together they created a plan, discussed customizations that provided instant ease of use, and tackled roadblocks along the way. When Amy would experience pushback from her team, she shared: 

“Talking to Alex, he was always really good at giving the framework as to how to change those perceptions. I have a partner. I don’t think we would have gotten to where we are without Alex.”

– Amy Elias, Creative Operations Manager

Another way Legacy Health was able to gain team buy-in was to use Workzone’s project dashboard as their guide during every production meeting. 

Every Thursday the project leads, writers, designers, and web specialists meet to review workloads and discuss hurdles they might be facing, making sure everyone has the information they need for their projects. 

Workzone’s capabilities have brought meaningful bottom-line value to Legacy Health by providing:

• A central hub for documents and communications
• At-a-glance status updates on projects
• Metrics and reporting to evaluate best practices, ROI, and keep leadership and stakeholders informed and onboard

When Workzone is used as the single source of truth for project management, allowing team members to see where project priorities lie, where everyone is spending their time, manage requests and approvals from other departments, and collaborate globally, they’re more likely to understand and appreciate how important it is for them to fully embrace use of the system.

Outcomes

Using Workzone, Legacy Health has gained a project management partner and a problem-solver. Increased adoption of Workzone throughout the system has resulted in:

• Removing silos, creating an overall workflow and efficiencies
• Ability to see all projects in motion, preventing problems from escalating
• A big picture view of all activities, providing insight into where new needs arise

Centralized communication was one of the initial hurdles Legacy Health addressed. One significant problem they faced was that they were dealing with hundreds of orders from multiple vendors and departments.

Amy shares an example: 

“We got a call from a client saying, ‘You made a mistake.’ They had received 500 more posters than they were expecting, and they were unhappy about the added cost. At the time of the call, the project lead was in the video studio overseeing production, and we didn’t want to interrupt him. Before Workzone, we would have had to pull him out of the studio to double-check the details. 

But with the Workzone systems in place, we were able to look at the original requests, see what was actually sent over to the vendor, and look at the order acknowledgment and determine that no, we had not made the error. So, what would have been a ‘fire drill’ before was resolved in 15 minutes thanks to the records available to us in Workzone.”

Takeaways

When you choose Workzone, you get a partner invested in your success. Any project management platform can offer similar task management processes; we provide:

• A partner to guide you through process change
• A single source of truth to see progress in real-time
• Proven value to stakeholders

Amy’s team is experiencing this firsthand: “My team is now a resource for the other teams in our system. They are the evangelists, helping us drive home that using Workzone is helping to show their value. It’s having a ripple effect through our organization and leadership is seeing it.”

Are you looking for a project management platform that will transform your work processes into efficient, problem-solving, value-proving vehicles? Then it’s time to request a Workzone demo. 

This article originally appeared on the WorkZone Project Management Software blog.

He was tasked with creating the in-house advertising department to serve the 11 casinos and resorts under the umbrella of the popular and well known entertainment brand.

Knowing Workzone from a previous employer, Michael approached Workzone wondering if it could handle the volume, organization, and most importantly, the entire creative process from intake to delivery.

Their Needs

What does a Creative Director need to receive, process, and start 125 requests for projects every week?

Michael had three requirements that Workzone needed to excel at in order to make his newly formed department successful:

Be flexible

To Michael, flexibility meant that Workzone needed to be adaptable to his team’s needs in three distinct ways.

• Handle a high volume of requests. Serving 11 casinos and resorts comes with serving many projects. Streamlining work was at the top of his list.
• Michael needed the flexibility for an intake form to handle routine and strategic requests for projects like a bingo card for bingo night to large creative briefs for special events.
• Between receiving a high volume of requests and handling all types and sizes of requests, he needed to organize information quickly and accurately.

Easy to use

From clients to project managers, Michael explained that “everybody has their own technical level” and Workzone needed to work for users all with different skill levels with technology.

Great reporting

Michael relies heavily on reporting to see how many projects are active, what his team schedule can handle, and to report to his superiors.

Their Successes

Workzone exceeded his expectations.

“Workzone saves me at least an hour a day, easily,” Michael reported.

Handling Project Requests

One of Michael’s chief concerns was Workzone’s ability to handle project requests at both a high volume and be able to report on them. For many teams, weekly meetings surrounding project status is a waste of time. For Michael however, its not.

“Something that might take hours, you can literally have a quick 10, 15 minute meeting about,” Michael said.

Michael utilizes the request dashboard to monitor his daily intake. He described a process where he uses the column notes to give him a quick update on where the project stands.

Delivering Results

Michael was also proud to report that his team never missed a costly vendor deadline which translates to a 95%+ deadline achievement overall.

His clients are happy, his team is happy, and he is happy.

“I pull up our completed projects report and that justifies the cost by itself,” Michael said.

Michael also boasts that his team saved Tropicana $365,000 in annual operations costs, and completed over 20,000 projects. An often overlooked benefit to efficiency is the savings from not hiring additional staff to help traffic creative projects. When a system like Workzone is implemented correctly, the creative team moves at breakneck speeds.

Ease of use for his team

Interacting with so many internal clients and customers of his, Michael had to have Workzone be simple for clients but also his own team to pick up quickly.

Michael’s coworker Katie reports “It is very user friendly. Within a week I was able to figure it out”.

Workzone’s centralization on his team’s work meant that conversations around projects, tasks, and review and approval were all in one spot. Because it’s cloud based, Workzone could be accessed anywhere whether you have a PC or not.

“The markup features are very essential because not everybody has the capability to open up a PDF, let alone mark one up. They don’t have to worry about their platform, they can mark it up.”

This article originally appeared on the WorkZone Project Management Software blog.

Faced with creating this new division, HACC leadership searched for a tool that would fit both their needs and budget.

When it came to selecting a tool, they had three requirements:

• Easy to use for many users
  HACC was planning on having a lot of users accessing the system, so they knew anyone from designers to faculty members needed to learn the tool quickly.
• Versatile in the types of projects they complete
  Their new system had to handle simple, small projects to large-scale, multi-faceted campaigns.
• Accountability features
  Email reminders and to-do lists needed to be central to the tool.

“We’re a very email-heavy culture, so having those automatic email notices is helpful and attractive to us,” said Amanda Griesser, Integrated Marketing Communications Coordinator for Project Management.

The Choice: Workzone

HACC researched various tools and encountered a familiar problem: breadth of choice. But they narrowed down their choice to Workzone. “Workzone was really best suited to meet our needs and, quite frankly, it was more economical than the other options out there,” Amanda said.

Significant Changes

Amanda is familiar with how project management benefits a community college like HACC. She serves as the big-picture project manager to help things run smoothly from beginning to end – from the time that a project is submitted to its final completion. She has been able to run with some of the most used aspects in Workzone, including project templates. During the heaviest times of the year, upwards of 75 projects are active at one time, ranging from small brochures to multi-faceted campaigns.

“Templates have made a huge difference in terms of being able to set up projects quickly and efficiently,” Amanda said.

She appreciates the flexibility of the projects tab and lives in it. Between creating new projects or adjusting projects on the fly, she’s in and out of projects daily.

“The projects tab is great, because it is the most helpful in keeping everything moving as smoothly as possible.”

Satisfaction Made Easy

“Workzone is one of my best friends at work.”

Amanda enjoys her work at HACC and gets personal satisfaction from a job well done.

“I get a lot of satisfaction out of being able to complete tasks. When you can see that progress moving along and see that you’re staying on track, it’s just a good feeling,” Amanda said.

It helps that Workzone is easy to use, as one of HACC’s original goals was for their new system to be used by many people.

“Workzone is very easy to pick up from a user standpoint. It just makes sense. It’s a very clean layout, a very user-friendly site,” Amanda said.

Easy Onboarding and Training

Being a long-time customer of Workzone, HACC had established a relationship with one of Workzone’s first trainers, Lisa Heuerman.

“I got plenty of training from Lisa when I started. She was wonderful,” Amanda said. “Everyone throughout my time here has been very responsive and has been wonderful with answering any bizarre technical questions that we have. The customer service has always been really helpful.”

When Amanda isn’t leveraging Workzone’s support team to onboard a new employee or train a colleague, Amanda shares her excitement and positive attitude for project management. “We are such a project-heavy organization and there’s so much going on. It just feels really good to easily just check things off and see the progress that’s being made.”

“I’ve been on the other side where there has been no project management system whatsoever. And then I came to HACC and was introduced to Workzone, and I can never go back,” Amanda said.

This article originally appeared on the WorkZone Project Management Software blog.

Gina Price, the Production Coordinator for Purdue University’s Agricultural Communications team, sure does.

“We did an initial survey of our clients and found out that they weren’t sure how to contact AgComm. They weren’t sure what services we provided. And, they didn’t understand our processes,” Gina said.

As the production coordinator (sort of like the concierge to the clients), Gina helps the flow of projects inside the department. Her clients are all internal — with a twist.

She serves 11 departments inside the College of Agriculture as well as Purdue extension offices located in all 92 counties in Indiana.

Reviewing the situation, Gina and her department knew they needed to look for project management software.

Situation: Lack of Transparency

The AgComm team’s mission is to collaborate with clients, partner with them and provide strategic, innovative ideas. Gina felt they could do better and the survey confirmed that.

“Our clients really wanted to be more involved with the process,” Gina said. With 35 people on her team serving over 300 individual clients, improving client relations was her number one goal.

Before Workzone, the AgComm team was using Excel and other teams they worked with had their own ways of tracking projects.

“I don’t know how we did it,” Gina said.

Gina also couldn’t see the big picture of what was going on. Different team members had little to no contact with each other, let alone a method of collaborating with each other.

“We could have a client working with somebody with a video and then that same client working with somebody in news, but neither the news nor the video person would know that,” Gina said.

After conferring with her department heads to determine what they needed, they identified three main requirements.

• Not too technical.
  “One of the main requirements was to find software not too technical so it’s easy for everybody that has never done this before,” Gina stated.
• Advanced reporting.
  Serving so many clients and needing to report on all their activity, Gina needed to report on capacity and share reports with her management.
• A collaborative slant.
  The tool they picked needed to be collaborative, with multiple people having access to requests, dashboards, and project status.

With so many tools on the market, Gina’s experience in searching for solutions was a common one.

“I probably researched over 50 different solutions,” Gina reported. “There were a lot of solutions out there. Wrike or Smartsheet got really expensive with too many bells and whistles. And you couldn’t report with Basecamp or Trello.”

Results

Improved Client Relations

Remember that survey that sparked the project management search? Gina doesn’t worry about those anymore.

“Our clients are really, really happy.”

“Project surveys are consistently above average or excellent,” Gina said.

The feedback goes beyond the survey, in fact. Now, people are telling her how improved the process is and how much better it is for them.

“I hear from our clients all the time now that they love getting the schedules. They feel like they know what’s going on with our processes,” Gina reported.

Crafting Strategy and Hitting Goals

Gina dug into Workzone almost immediately. She recommends that other admins do the same as it was a great learning experience. She worked alongside the team at Workzone to develop a strategy moving forward.

“Connor really helped me with strategy. I would tell him where I was trying to get to and he would give me some options of how to get there. I thought that was great,” Gina said.

To aid her in setting goals for her department, team, and individuals, Gina utilized Workzone’s training programs to onboard her colleagues.

“Connor set up as many trainings as I wanted. We did trainings with just me, group training, and individual training. I never felt like a burden,” Gina said.

Gina continued, “Workzone is a great tool to help you stay strategic, focused and driving towards your goals. It also helps each individual achieve their goals within our department.”

All of her hard work has made a large impact on delivering great results to the University.

“As a department we work better together to build stronger communication plans and projects per client,” Gina said.

This article originally appeared on the WorkZone Project Management Software blog.

Requests from every department. Quick deadlines.

That was the situation for the marketing department of the Division of Extended Learning and Outreach (or affectionately called DELO) at Western Kentucky University. WKU is a public university with approximately 20,000 students.

This division is the outreach arm of the WKU. Through partnerships with faculty, academic departments, businesses and organizations, DELO offers a wide variety of for-credit and non-credit programs to students of all ages, interests and locations.

DELO has a seven-person marketing department which consists of a marketing manager, a market research/CRM coordinator and marketing specialists who oversee digital marketing and web/print design. They develop marketing for all DELO units and offices, ranging from online programs, dual credit and summer/winter to lifelong learning and workforce training.

“We function like an agency. We do everything from writing news releases and marketing content to developing print ads, posters, brochures, email campaigns and paid ads for digital marketing,” said Susan Esters, marketing manager for DELO.

Problems: Complexity, Trust, and Control

To keep up with all of those projects across numerous departments, the marketing team decided to try out project management software to help them manage requests.

First, the team used a homegrown, customized task management solution that was reliant on email and on individuals to coordinate all of their projects. There was also no record of the email communication.

Next, the whole division adopted one enterprise-level tool for use across all departments, including marketing.

But here’s how the team described that tool:

• Too big
• Complicated
• Hours of Training
• Really Expensive
• Not user friendly
• No vetting of new projects

“It was so complex. There was layer upon layer of information,” Susan said.

Other team members described having to fix project requests for others and that any and all requests, no matter if it fit the timeline or priorities, was automatically converted into a project, causing a lot of problems between the marketing department and the departments they serve.

“The system placed the burden on the clients to communicate their marketing needs,” said Anna Kerr, DELO marketing coordinator. “It created confusion, missed information and even some trust issues.”

Clients didn’t know the status of projects, how to enter them into the project management system or how long it would take to complete. Marketing didn’t feel like they were in control of their deadlines or deliverables. The clients were submitting marketing projects with no knowledge of what information was needed or how much work the marketing team needed to complete it.

“There was no confirmation. There were no forms. They aren’t marketing people. They shouldn’t have been expected to know all of our timelines. But in the old system, there was no way around it,” Susan said.

Every request was thrown against the wall, hoping to get done in a timeframe that may or may not have been fair to the team tasked with doing the actual work. Those trust issues started to take their toll.

“We talked about how frustrated we were about it,” Anna said. “It started to be every day that I had to find a project on someone’s computer because they couldn’t find a project where they had entered it.”

Action: Their Search and Choice

When their contract was up, they knew there had to be a better solution. One that would help them successfully manage their marketing projects, while also communicating more reliably and specifically with the departments they were trying to serve.

They knew how they wanted their team to function, with an emphasis on collaboration, but something that was easy to use. And a tool that would allow them to stay in control of their project management with crisp communication.

Those were the main benefits they were looking for, but it also had to have some key features:

• Email documentation and notifications
• Custom project request forms
• Ability to assign tasks
• Quick approvals

They already had experience with a complex tool – “It did way more than we needed it to,” Susan said—but they soon realized that smaller, task management options wouldn’t cut it without custom project request forms and approvals.

Instead, they chose Workzone—a project management software that’s easy to use, but with powerful features.

“Workzone was right in the middle, which is what we needed,” Anna said. “Workzone has worked so well for us, because it’s so flexible. It doesn’t make it complicated.”

Instead of days of training, the marketing team was up and running quickly in Workzone.

Easy Project Request Forms

They quickly saw the value in project request forms that they could customize themselves.
Easy-to-access forms without signing in – The marketing team set up different types of projects that their department heads could then fill out and request a project. This kept their clients out of the day-to-day of project management, but also kept communication inside of Workzone rather than by email.
Provide exact information – The forms ask the questions and details that the marketing team needs to get the job done. There’s no more guessing and not as much back and forth to figure out the exact requirements and needs. And the marketing team can change and update the forms if project needs change. This way they get all of the information they need right away before the project even begins.

Any time one of their clients has a project need, they start right here with the form. This is where everything in Workzone begins. The team then receives it, reviews it and then assigns it to the appropriate marketing team member for the next steps.

“For the most part, it’s pretty well-oiled. We started out with a really good list of forms and then we had to tweak them a little bit. If we kept having to request certain information, we just added it to the form. It’s been a work in progress, but it’s very rare. It works really well. We love it,” Susan said.

From the forms, the client or department can pick what type of project they need. The DELO marketing team has created forms for everything from a brochure to postcards to digital monitor ads and email campaigns.

This also sparks new ideas for the type of deliverable that the team might use. For instance, one department may just request a postcard because that’s what they always do, but if they see an integrated paid social campaign as an option, they may reconsider their priorities.

“We rely on Workzone every day for managing all of our projects. We would be lost without it.” -Susan Esters

“It gives our teams new ideas, because they can choose from a list of things that our department offers. Without being prompted, they may not have even thought of them,” said Rhonda Gibbs, a marketing associate for DELO.

The request forms went a long way to improving how work got done for their clients.

Central Place of Communication

Besides fielding new requests, using Workzone also created a centralized place of communication where all of the records, comments, updates and approvals go.

“We send everything through Workzone,” said Rhonda. She reviews every project request and then assigns to the appropriate team member. “It records everything so wonderfully.”

Instead of communicating about projects and approvals via email or messaging apps, they can do it all in Workzone. That includes project files and any new changes. It’s been an adjustment, but a good one.

“We use Skype a lot as a marketing team, so I was in the habit of just Skyping someone or I would email them about projects. If I emailed them or Skyped them outside of Workzone, it wasn’t documented in one place. I’ve had to train myself to use Workzone to communicate about projects,” Susan said.

Their Results

Increased Efficiency + 275% increase in email campaigns

Since implementing Workzone, the team’s workload has increased significantly. That both proved the need for Workzone, but also helped them complete projects even efficiently.

For example, Anna said that five years ago, she would send less than 80 email campaigns each year. That number has skyrocketed to almost 300. She can see the process and accountability that Workzone has brought to help manage that number. Without Workzone, she doesn’t think they could effectively coordinate 300 email campaigns.

“Workzone really helped me to list out the email campaigns steps and double-check tasks,” Anna said.

More Visibility and Collaboration

Another benefit is the increased communication and collaboration. It has allowed team members to see what others are working on, and chip in if needed or to pull images, copy or other assets from different projects to complete projects faster. It’s broken down their individual tunnel vision and silos.

One designer can pull ideas from another project, or the marketing coordinators can access images and drop those into a social or email campaign without having to request a whole new project or issuing another task.

“For most campaigns, there are multiple pieces that come together. It stops us from calling a meeting for every project or we would be meeting 24/7,” continued Susan.

Flexibility With a Strong Foundation

Perhaps most importantly, the marketing team has confidence in Workzone as a project management system. It has given them a solid foundation to manage increasing marketing requests, as well as new technology, demands and growth.

“Many people come to me and say, ‘This is what’s coming up so can you figure out a way to do it?’ So I need a practical application of how to implement it. I need Susan, the department and other team members to see the process written out. Workzone allows the flexibility for new project implementation with solid communication for all involved,” Anna says.

Susan says that Workzone helps her team work more cohesively with clients throughout DELO.

“We as a team are really good at what we do. We all play to our strengths. That’s really important, not only as part of a team, but to be efficient. In one fell swoop, Workzone allows us to see the big picture of everything that is going on.”

This article originally appeared on the WorkZone Project Management Software blog.

That was what Ashley Martin, the Executive Director, University Marketing and Creative Services at Kansas State University wanted in a project management tool.

The University Relations team at KSU is the centralized marketing and communications hub for the university. Formed about 6 years ago, the team serves more than 100 colleges, departments, units and other university clients, ranging from Admissions to Engineering to the Office of Student Life.

“We function as an in house agency for the university. We intake projects through folks who were called client managers like account supervisors at an agency and they intake those projects and get them into the queue for creation,” said Ashley.

With a 44 person team plus a number of student workers, the University Relations team tracks more than 400 active projects at any one time.

Problems: Inconsistency, Oversight, and Communication

“We were really working against each other as opposed to with each other. ” Ashley said.

With creating this new office of University Relations, KSU was encountering a common problem higher-ed marketing teams face: inconsistency. It’s an enemy very familiar to many teams, but for higher-ed marketing teams, inconsistency seeps into many aspects of a project lifecycle and how they deal with internal clients.

Inconsistency problems were far-reaching:

• The number of different tools teams were using (some were using Word, others Excel, and others Basecamp)
• The branding they delivered on projects
• The inefficient processes they were using to manage projects

“Everybody was using different tools and there was no oversight from a branding perspective to make sure that everything was cohesive across the board. At one point the university tried an enterprise wide launch of Microsoft Project, but that failed because a lot of folks on campus couldn’t figure out how to best use it in their areas,” Ashley said.

Action: The Search

“We were trying to find a way to unify everyone,” Ashley Martin said.

In order to better achieve the consistency and cohesion they were looking for, leadership felt that centralizing their project management process was the way to go.

Like many searching for project management software, they began with a large list of 20-25 choices. KSU had defined four priorities to narrow down the list of choices.

• Easy to use.

  They surely didn’t want to relive the complexity of Microsoft Project again.

• Quick setup.

  Capacity was at max levels. Their new unit needed to get setup quickly because the project list kept growing and growing.

• A partner.

  Ashley said, “We wanted to find a partner who was a large enough company that we knew that they would be around for a long time, but small enough that we still felt like we would get individualized attention if we ever had any concerns or issues”.

• Cost effective.

  Being a new team, they needed a tool that would give them great value without costing them a lot of money.

KSU chose Workzone to solve their inconsistency issues and track their work from request to final creative. Workzone was the right mix of a company with a strong track record and the personal touch to work with all levels of users on a college campus.

To get setup quickly, KSU leveraged Workzone’s on-boarding plan to start tracking all of their projects within one month.

Results

Regarding how much its improved their creative process, Steve Logback, Assistant VP of Communications and Marketing at KSU says has often been asked Why didn’t we do this sooner?.

On Top of Their Game

Before they brought on Workzone, KSU had situations where a client manager was out in the field with a client from an academic department. That person may have asked the client manager, “Hey, where’s this project at?”. Without a centralized system, the client manager was caught off guard.

“It really made us look like we weren’t on top of our game. Now having an online system, we can access it anywhere on campus. They can quickly look up the project to see the status of the project and inform the client,” Ashley stated.

Gone are the days of looking bad in front of an internal client. Now when they are in the field, client managers can answer the question of project status just by looking at a Workzone dashboard.

“It makes our clients know that we’re on top of everything that we’re working on for them,” Ashley said.

KSU’s client managers can now work from anywhere on campus and its online  accessibility has been a game changer in efficiency.

“Our teams can enter projects when they’re out visiting on campus. They don’t have to wait until they get back in the office. It’s really increased our efficiency and improved our communication,” Ashley said.

Cost Effective Solution

Without much of a budget, KSU needed a powerful tool that could keep up with their pace without breaking the bank. From time and efficiency savings to an increased amount of projects completed, KSU has impressed its peers.

“Workzone has saved us at least an hour per project, the equivalent of one-half of a
person. The time– savings alone is worth five times the cost of Workzone,” reports Logback.

Consistency in Project Delivery

KSU achieved consistency through Workzone’s flexibility. Ashley found that she could build out Workzone for different types of organizations she oversees and easily change aspects of it if she needs to.

Specifically, Ashley has leveraged project templates to consistent deliver projects where she didn’t before.

“The steps for a design print piece are completely different than what our video team would be doing, so really making sure that we customize each template in a way that makes sense to our team individually, helps with communication,” Ashley said.

Leveraging project templates wasn’t all that rosy at first. Ashley and her team learned a valuable lesson in how to work with templates and understanding what matters most in tracking projects.

Ashley said, “We realized we got to the point where we were over processing ourselves and making a task for every little step in the process. We learned over time that we don’t need to track every teeny little thing and we have that flexibility with it, which is great. And we can change those templates really easily and make sure that it is customizable.”

Quick Setup and Ongoing Support

Getting set up quickly was an original goal of the KSU team when they first purchased Workzone. Besides the smooth initial implementation, new users pick up Workzone quickly.

“People pick it up really quickly. Any type of project management system seems intimidating at first, but once you’re in it, it’s fine. On-boarding is really easy with this system,” said Ashley.

Workzone understands that marketing directors and coordinators don’t have time to train new employees one on one. That’s why Workzone offers unlimited training and support for the life of the contract.

This article originally appeared on the WorkZone Project Management Software blog.