Digital Creative Agency Discovered a Solution That Supports Their Agile Work Structure
Their story
A combination of inefficiency and scattered information led Dare to seek a new solution.
Dare is an agency that prides itself on its Agile approach to projects. Agile is a disciplined project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation. With tight deadlines and requests constantly coming in, it's important to stay on top of each and every project and Agile enables them to do so. Dare: the Bristol team is made up of 12 full-time team members and additional freelancers are brought in regularly.
Dare’s Bristol Hub uses the Scrum framework across all projects so the team can work as efficiently as possible, but stay flexible for last minute changes. The team adopted Agile in 2015 and soon realized they needed a solution that could fully support it by enabling them to work in an Agile way, facilitate collaboration with clients, and ensure everything is transparent.
Dare used an alternative project management solution but it lacked the functionality to support their processes. Managing Partner, Fergus Adam recalls, “Because the conversation was all at a project level, rather than at task level, we just found it replaced the Inbox. But with an Inbox, it was really hard to search, so it was just a nightmare finding stuff.”
Additionally, administrative processes used by the agency were tedious and time-consuming. For example, the invoice processing system wasted time the team could be spending on client projects.
The project management solution the team used meant that information around projects still wasn’t necessarily centralized and that particulars around specific elements were not clear. Adam recalls, “We were used to using stuff at a job level, but I think the move onto individual task level was a real benefit.”
The combination of a lack of transparency and manual processes hampering projects drove Adam to seek an alternative solution. After researching different options available, Dare chose Wrike because it offered a clear and user-friendly solution to provide an audit trail for clients as well as a single source of truth. The agency adopted Wrike and migrated all their information from the business over from their old platform over the course of a few days.
Their victory
Wrike helped cut down on costs and cement a single source of truth.
The implementation of Wrike at Dare’s Bristol hub meant changes that they hadn’t even anticipated. “When we started using Wrike we really didn't know what it could do,” recalls Adam, “It was only when we started delving deeper that some of the real benefits came to light, and those are the things that now really make a difference. It's things like workflows and dashboards and reports that we didn't discover until a bit later on, but are now really central to how we work.”
A cost-effective solution
The implementation of Wrike served not only as a time-saver but also saved the company on expenditure. By managing all their projects in Wrike, the team was able have a central location for all their work and eliminate their use of several other tools where work was done across several platforms. As well as being a better fix, the tool was also more cost-effective.
A central platform for all stakeholders
Dare won a pitch on a large website development for a well-known renewable energy provider in the UK and the site was to be live in 8 or 9 weeks. It was an incredibly fast project and the team determined the only way to execute was to have everything be completely open and transparent. This was the moment where they decided to open Wrike up to clients and add them as collaborators. “It really started to gain traction at that moment because it became our main, our only, real form of communication with the client.”
Dare uses freelancers regularly for projects and at times these contributors can be located anywhere in the world. Wrike has facilitated collaboration and connectivity despite the distance that is sometimes involved. The team worked on an app recently for a client located in the US. “We brought in a freelancer and we ended up hiring someone in an extremely remote forest outside Seattle,” Adam explains, “We did it all through Wrike and all the development tasks were managed in there. It would have been impossible to do it, I think, without that central place for everything.”
Integrations facilitate automation
A flexible, connected system with clear workflows
Wrike allowed Dare to develop their own custom workflows to manage and prioritize different projects. “The prioritization functionality is absolutely core to the way we work because everything is done in two-week sprints. The prioritization allows us to work very openly with a client about what they want to do first.”
The team has developed different workflows for different aspects of their projects. For client projects, they have a 13-stage workflow from identifying the problem to completion. Additionally, the team has separate workflows to determine costs for jobs. Items will go through being ball-parked to fully estimated to fully signed off. This work sits alongside the job process, meaning admin work at the end of a project isn’t overwhelming or time-consuming.
Less painful processes for administrative tasks
Their superpowers
Reports
Wrike reports allow users to view projects at a high level so they can manage expectations better. All information is in real time, ensuring accuracy and saving creative teams time to concentrate on what’s important.
Custom workflows
Wrike allows teams to create workflows to meet their needs. Dare uses 12 separate workflows to manage everything from backlogged items to the billing process to personal to-do lists.
Focused communication
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