Jason Stone, vice president of operations at MarkeTeam, recently helped out the Calico Agency by finding the CEO’s cat and returning him to his loving office. (Admiral Purr was in the biplane, in case you were curious.) More importantly, though, Jason relies on Workamajig’s project management solution to keep things running smoothly for every department, and for everybody, on every project at MarkeTeam.
Over the 13 years I’ve been with MarkeTeam, I’ve worked in every department. I know the issues we have now and have had in the past. And I know what each department needs from a project management system. Now, as vice president of operations, I’m tasked with bringing all of that knowledge together to find a project management solution that will meet all of those needs. We’re going with Workamajig.
I actually first discovered Workamajig about 10 years ago, but it’s only recently that I’ve been in a position to implement it. We’ve been using a custom, database-driven solution to manage our projects and timelines, and it’s been the source of some frustration. When our sales team is on the road, they can’t access the system without going through our virtual network connection, which isn’t always reliable. It can be hard to find files, because they’re often saved on different servers. And forget trying to schedule meetings or synchronize calendars — a lot of employees use different calendar systems that don’t communicate with each other. At peak, we had seven different software systems going for file management, creative management, mail, scheduling and accounting.
When we started looking for a new project management system in April of 2014, I checked out several of Workamajig’s competitors. But time and time again, we came back to Workamajig — it is, far and away, the only system that suits all of our needs in a way that works with the way we do business. The biggest benefit that Workamajig has over other systems is that all of the functions are completely integrated. Every department at MarkeTeam can work off of the same system. Communication, organization and scheduling all happen seamlessly.
To get Workamajig off the ground in our office, we developed a launch team. I wanted to make sure we had all the key stakeholders represented on the team — controller, production manager, AD/creative director and IT director. And me, of course. We’re three months into Workamajig’s 10-week training program. Each week includes an hour-and-a-half conference call with our trainer, along with a little bit of homework. (I thought I was done with homework after college. I was wrong.) We also have separate, internal training sessions once our homework is done to reinforce the lessons. Our sessions are surprisingly fun, with lots of spirited discussion about how we’re going to use the system in ways that will work best for our team. And what’s really great is that if we have questions, we can contact Workamajig via phone or email to get the answers we need quickly.
Right now, all we have left are the Accounting and Go-Live training sessions, and we’re looking to launch the system fully by the end of Q1. It’s been a lot of work to learn the ins and outs of Workamajig — as you’d expect with any new system — but we’ve found that being patient and doing our homework has absolutely been worth it. With all of the functions and options Workamajig has to offer, our team is really excited about the launch.
I’ll keep you posted as we implement Workamajig, get it up and running and see all the ways it works for us.
