How Advance used Twproject to improve visibility, minimize the overhead of project management and increase compliance with time sheeting

The challenge

From building software and managing networks to implementing off-the-shelf tools, Advance has been helping clients get the most from their technology for over 25 years.

Advance is a niche strategic consultancy that offers the services of a large firm, and that made it difficult to find a project management tool that was a good fit.

“Our old system was focused on ticketing and issue management and did that well, but we were getting into complex software development and rolling out software. It wasn’t helping us plan projects because it wasn’t built for software development.”

John-Paul knew that project managers were spending half of every day shuffling tickets on a Kanban board.

“I was looking for something that would take away the overhead of managing projects and that would help my project management experience be an easier experience.”

Advanced needed a tool like Twproject to view and manage ToDo tasks in a simple and immediate Kanban format.

We get a lot more visibility towards what’s going on. Projects are running more smoothly, people find it easy to do timesheets and the system gets used.

Approach

• Implementation: Advance opted for an out-of-the-box set up of Twproject with a few custom fields and the team found the process straightforward.
• Flexible project management: Some project managers create detailed Gantt charts; others use Kanban views for task management. Twproject is flexible enough to do both. 
• Clients: The Advance team made the assumption that it was important to have access for customers. However, customers didn’t agree! Client accounts are available but not heavily used.
• Organizational knowledge: Client and project information is centrally stored and easy to find instead of buried in email, Slack or manual notes, creating a searchable knowledge repository for the future.
• Ongoing management: The solution had to be manageable without a PMO or system administrator dedicated to making it work. 

Results

• More visibility for client-centric project tracking
• Managing projects feels smoother and takes less time
• Users no longer need to be chased for timesheets

Increased visibility

Since implementing Twproject, customer and project data is easier to find as everything is kept tagged and linked within the system.

“Full-text search capability is ‘fantastic.’ Tags provide an easy way to track and categorize activities. I can raise a ticket and tag it ‘ask customer’. The software developers love using the tags. Reducing the time spent looking for data means the team can focus on tasks that drive customer results.”

Lower overhead with better control

The Advance team reduced the admin associated with keeping their project management tool up-to-date by using fit-for-purpose features and tailoring for the approach to the project. They no longer have to try to manage within the constraints of their old tool. Twproject is flexible enough to offer predictive and iterative project tracking tools that allow for comprehensive project control when needed such as staying on top of customizations for clients, as well as informal task management.

“Twproject has the ability to use different mechanisms to know how you’re progressing on a project – and we didn’t have that before,” says John-Paul. “We can see when there’s issues and when there’s things that are causing concern. The people leading the projects have got greater visibility over where their projects are at.”

Increased compliance for timesheets

Twproject’s streamlined approach for managing timesheets helped with user adoption as the Advance team found it so easy to track their time. Twproject removed the overwhelm felt by staff who were assigned to dozens of projects but only actively working on a few. Hiding projects creates a user-friendly interface that minimizes on-screen clutter.

“That helped bring people in. I used to chase people more regarding their tasks. Now I rarely have to do it.”

The bottom line

Since implementing Twproject, Advance has been able to improve and scale its approach to capturing project and client data, reduce the amount of time the team spends on the administrative aspects of project control and flex project approaches to better fit the work and the customer.

Twproject is really good when managing a number of projects and they are quite different. Our implementation is pretty much vanilla, even if Twproject has the potential for an enterprise application.