Read Sheffield's thoughts on ProWorkflow for project management
| Your Company | Sheffield Marketing |
| Website | www.sheffieldcompany.com |
| Location | Downers Grove, IL, USA |
| Number of employees | 19 |
| Estimated Client number | 30 |
| Industry/s | Boutique marketing firm that specializes in visual storytelling |
| Platforms - OS/ browsers? | Primarily Mac-based, Safari, Chrome, Firefox |
| Length of time using PWF | 2 years |
TO BE UPDATED – How did you manage work before ProWorkflow?
We managed our work through several Microsoft Word and Excel documents. As well as many folders, reports and documents.
What was it that you wanted from a project management tool?
We wanted a way to track many aspects of our business. We wanted to be able to see what projects were going under or over budget and which projects were being executed late or on time. We also wanted a way to predict workflow for the upcoming month and quarter.
Did you look at any other project management systems?
Yes we looked at several others. Ultimately we agreed that ProwWorkflow would best fit our needs and budget.
What was it that made you choose PWF?
We choose ProWorkflow because it did everything that we needed it to without any extra maintenance. Good launch support, friendly team, responsive to questions/requests.
How did you manage the change to a new system?
It took us about six months until we were really using ProWorkflow to its capacity. The biggest change was agreeing how we should define the steps of our projects (hours/team or hours/milestone). It took us a while to get all of our new and existing projects into ProWorkflow as well as developing a seamless system as to how our company would facilitate the project management process moving forward. Once we had our system down, it was smooth sailing.
Are there any measurable values that you can mention in regards to how ProWorkflow has improved your business? (Hours and resource savings, profitability increased by % etc.)
The biggest time/money saver for us was the way we used to plan for upcoming work vs. how we plan for it now. We used to have an Excel spreadsheet where we housed everyone’s workload for the upcoming month by project. We would meet weekly with the various teams to plan what work was ahead.
Now, we set up a completely custom report in ProWorkflow that does this for us. We can look ahead to see the workload of the company, by team or even by individual. This gives us a quick, high-level glance into the future that we didn’t have before. Overall, having this report feature in ProWorkflow saves us about 40 to 50 hours per week.
How do you regard PWF in terms of its importance to the running of your business today?
We NEED ProWorkflow! Our team lives in the system and has ProWorkflow open on their computers all day. They are logging their time, checking what projects they have coming up and planning ahead. All of our due dates, hour allocations by tasks and budget are housed in ProWorkflow and we wouldn’t be able to effectively do our jobs without it!
How do you regard PWF in terms of its importance to the running of your business today?
PWF is a serious business tool to plan and run projects. It is the tool which our Project and Studio Managers live and breathe by.
What sort of work do you undertake?
We are in the business of corporate story-telling. Our work generally revolves around design and video production.
What is the most common way you access ProWorkflow?
We usually access ProWorkflow from laptops, sometimes from iPads and occasionally from our mobile phones.
What benefits do you find from working in the ‘cloud’?
We have a lot of different moving parts to our business, and as such we have employees all over the city or even country on a weekly basis. Having a cloud based platform makes checking in on projects seamless, from any location.
From your experience using ProWorkflow is there any advice you could give to other users?
Honestly, the most helpful aspects of ProWorkflow have been discovered for us simply by playing around in the system. We would think of something that we would like ProWorkflow to be able to do for us, and we would figure out a way to do it. ProWorkflow is a toolset, it doesn’t do your thinking for you. Also, the team at ProWorkflow has been very helpful and responsive in terms of helping us get ProWorkflow to work for our needs and our company.
—
Grace Rebrand, Marketing Ops Manager
Sheffield Company
