Teamwork paves the way for Imaginaire Digital’s growth
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Imaginaire Digital is a full-service web design and internet marketing agency in Nottingham, UK. Since 2014, the company has grown to become a leader known locally and regionally for its complete website design and development services that support long-term growth and deliver measurable results.
Ryan Jones, Digital Marketing Executive at Imaginaire Digital, told us about the changes the company has seen in a very short time. Their team of full-time staff members and freelancers started using Teamwork only a few months ago, but they’ve already seen results that helped them to win back time that had been lost using outdated tools that made scaling for growth impossible.
Productivity stalled
As a small company with multiple projects running simultaneously, Imaginaire Digital needed tools that accelerated collaboration, task delegation, and information sharing in a simple, clear-cut way. For years, they used tools that never truly fit their needs, but everything seemed like a compromise that wasn’t in their favor.
"We tried several project management tools like Basecamp, but they never suited our needs exactly. We still had to solve the problem of endless email trails and small jobs piling up while we were worried that something was going to slip through the cracks."
Within the team, they relied on Google Drive to share materials and Google Sheets to track tasks, but there was still a lot of confusion about which tasks needed to be completed and who was responsible for them. With multiple projects in progress at any given time, getting a project update required lengthy analysis of several complicated spreadsheets. And not everyone in the company was equally skilled at using Google Sheets’ more advanced features.
Client communication was managed from Google Docs, which worked for a while but wasn’t a scalable solution. “Using Google Drive solely was hindering our productivity due to the fact that we had so many projects flying about and we didn’t have an effective way of delegating these to people within the agency.”
After researching top project management platforms that could handle client work, personal projects, and sales work, they discovered Teamwork. Imaginaire Digital’s Director, Seb Dean, decided that Teamwork was exactly what they needed – it was affordable and had robust features that could help the whole team intuitively manage all of the tasks that had to be addressed on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
Smooth systems
Almost immediately after adopting Teamwork, the Imaginaire Digital team quickly realized that their everyday work had been simplified. Exchanging clear and transparent task lists, assignments, milestones, and deadlines with the entire team didn’t require repeated handoff meetings. The information was already available to everyone on the team.
"We are still a small agency with a lot of client work to complete each day. Teamwork has helped us from the word go by providing a nearly readymade process to add tasks, clients and even personal projects, delegate these to team members and track what has and hasn’t been done over the course of a month. The framework gave a natural structure to our workflows."
Initial concerns about how to manage the transition from Google Drive to Teamwork quickly vanished as projects were added and the full functionality of the software became apparent. While Imaginaire Digital doesn’t add clients into Teamwork as users or collaborators, they quickly set up a process to establish a point person for each client’s collateral, giving them improved communication, immediate access to materials, and the security of knowing that important documents or files weren’t getting lost along the way.
Client communication was immediately simplified, from daily updates to monthly reports on the work accomplished. “Before Teamwork, there was a lot of confusion about what work had been done and who had done it,” said Ryan. “With the automatic reporting tools, we have a more accurate snapshot of daily progress, and we don’t have to spend hours trying to calculate billable hours for each project. It’s all right there.”
Having all of the information in a simple platform has also helped the team reclaim their time and focus. Hours burned by manually inputting datapoints into spreadsheet cells is now invested into billable hours. And everyone can locate the information on their own, even if they’re not spreadsheet experts.
More work in less time
Less than a year ago, Ryan had no idea how Imaginaire Digital could possibly grow to keep up with client referrals. Now he has the answer.
"Without Teamwork, we would still be using an endless amount of Google Sheets to manage our ongoing project work. We made this work with a small client list, but now we have the tools to meet deadlines as more projects and clients come to us."
As they follow the data, team members can see that they are actually accomplishing more using project filters to capture important data like billable hours, deadlines, task assignments and more. Having this feedback loop has helped them adjust more quickly when problems arise — and make more accurate, profitable proposals to clients. Because responsibilities and deadlines are more clear, team members are automatically becoming more efficient without check-in meetings or reminders.
"None of the project management tools we’ve used have come close to suiting our needs as exactly as Teamwork. It’s so simple to use, and it’s so easy to manage your work and get more done."
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