Diona Kidd knows what it’s like to wear a lot of hats. As one of the founders of Knowmad, an Inbound Marketing agency, Diona does a bit of everything – from marketing and sales to client management. But above all, she spends most of her time thinking about how Knowmad can exceed client expectations without overburdening the agency’s limited resources.
“We’re a small team of six so it’s critical that we not only understand the current amount of work on everyone’s plate but we also need to be able to predict with a degree of confidence what our future state looks like,” says Diona.
Diona evaluated a number of different project management tools, with key requirements being the ability to collaborate within the tool, integrated time tracking, and analytics to support decision-making. In June 2011, Diona decided that LiquidPlanner would be the best fit for her team and her journey to streamline Knowmad’s project planning process was quickly underway.
LiquidPlanner is like having our own project management crystal ball, helping us to more accurately predict internal capacity and meet client expectations.
Every agency, regardless of industry or size, eventually faces the same challenge: how do we accurately staff our accounts and ensure that all of our resources are being appropriately utilized? Knowmad is no different in this respect. But with a small team, the stakes were even higher.
“In addition to our full-time staff, we also work with a number of external contractors and of course, our client’s projects are always shifting in priority which means we have to continuously load balance our resources. Now that everyone on our team tracks their time in LiquidPlanner, it’s easy for me or one of our campaign managers to quickly analyze the workload, re-assign tasks if necessary, or bring on extra resources if there are competing priorities. LiquidPlanner is like having our own project management crystal ball, helping us to more accurately predict internal capacity and meet client expectations,” she says.
For Diona, collaboration isn’t something that just happens between her and the rest of her team – it has also become an important conduit for keeping clients in the loop. Using the Project Portals feature in LiquidPlanner, Knowmad customizes the most important dimensions of a client’s project plan so their clients can see for themselves the status of key deliverables and mitigate potential blocking issues.