We spot potential resourcing issues early thanks to Aha!

Anthony Reed

Managing Director

We had a problem

Over the past six years, we’ve tried at least five different systems for managing our projects. All of them slowly dropped from use within three months as they couldn’t adapt to meet our specific needs and didn’t really add any value so our team members stopped using them. We needed to organize our projects by client, then by deliverables — and still have visibility to see all of our projects in a single view. Beyond that, it was difficult to drill down into each staff member’s workload, in terms of backlog and current activities. And we did not have a central, relevant place to store all project materials and conversations in context.

Aha! as a solution

We’ve now been using Aha! for just over three months and it’s absolutely ingrained in our agency and making a real difference to the way we manage projects and resources. The kanban workflow view helps us identify resourcing snarls and keep projects moving quickly. Communication is much clearer with the history and context maintained in Aha!

We love that we can customize all of the terminology in Aha! to meet our needs — it’s the perfect blend of agile management with strategic planning.

We have introduced Aha! notebooks with live-view reports to a couple of our key clients, giving them visibility into the status of every deliverable in their projects. They love it. We don’t have to produce any additional reports and export anything — we just get on with our work and it’s like they’re looking over our shoulder as we move deliverables through our workflow.

However, they still can’t see any of the internal communication, notes or to-dos, so the privacy of our team is maintained and our client’s don’t need to ask us where a particular deliverable is. It’s a very elegant solution.

Life is good

It’s still early days, but already we can quickly spot bottlenecks and overloaded resources.

All of our team picked it up quickly — it’s helping them do their work so they want to use it. We’ll be using Aha for a long time!

And we have a central place for strategic planning, so that our team can refer to it as they are running each client’s marketing campaigns.