Ideya: 5 years into managing creative projects, client timelines, and team resources with GanttPRO
“It's clearer and more impressive to have a Gantt chart to demonstrate the proposed timeline, as opposed to an email with a list of dates.”
A story about how a creative agency uses GanttPRO to manage client-oriented projects, coordinate team resources, and save time on manual deadline adjustments.
Company overview
Company: Ideya
Roles interviewed: Rick Binger, Creative Director and Principal
Project types: client creative projects running simultaneously
External pressures: client deadlines and feedback turnaround, coordination with external contractors and freelancers
Tool history: Apple Calendar, OmniFocus
Problems hinted at: need for a more professional management tool due the growing complexity of projects
Summary
Company Background
What does your company focus on?
Ideya is a boutique creative agency with a wide range of capabilities, from branding and advertising to design and digital.
Rick Binger, Creative Director and Principal, shared how GanttPRO has helped the team manage multiple creative initiatives running simultaneously over the past five years.
“The single moment that sums up why this tool works for me? Automatic deadline updates. No manual adjusting – just 30 seconds and everything recalculates on its own. That alone is a massive time saver. A delay on the client or even on our end is no longer a burdensome task of taking 30 minutes to redo the analog schedules.”
Struggle
How did your approach look before GanttPRO?
Before adopting GanttPRO, Rick describes the project management process as quite disorganized: “My primary tools were a mash-up of OmniFocus and Apple Calendar. It was a pretty analog, burdensome and somewhat disorganized experience.”
For simpler scope, this management style can still be enough. But when the work needs to be broken down into сomponents, GanttPRO comes into the picture.
“I tend to go into GanttPRO when it's a complex project that has many steps and milestones, and when I need to create a comprehensive timeline for the client and our team.”
Solution
To meet the needs of each engagement, the agency works with a contractor model that can involve up to 20 specialists, including developers, designers, copywriters, artists, and illustrators, who don’t need full access to the project.
“Our team is comprised of contractors and freelancers who have their own independent processes and don’t need to make edits. To manage these people, the virtual resources feature is my go-to. After I assign them all, I output a PDF, and share it with everyone who’s going to be involved in the project, so they can see exactly what their tasks and milestones are.”“If it’s a simple workflow with a few milestones, I will resort to a list within an email. But if it’s getting complex with a hierarchy of stages, dates, and milestones, auto scheduling, with the ability to change a date and have it ripple through the entire project, is a huge timesaver.
When we’re building a website, for instance, we've got quite a few steps – from strategy and wireframing to design and development, and each stage has multiple steps and milestones. In this case, if the client misses a deadline to turn around feedback, I can simply extend that particular task or milestone, and it just ripples through the rest of the project. In the past it might have taken 30 minutes or more to figure out all of those elements, so having that automated and dynamic is super helpful.”“One of the features that I appreciate a lot is PDF export. It's just super simple, but it's very useful for us to share either at the onset of a project, or even as part of the pitch process to show our direction. It's always more impressive to have a Gantt chart to demonstrate the proposed timeline, as opposed to an email with a list of dates.”
Impact
What does your work look like now with GanttPRO?
The way Rick sums up the biggest value of GanttPRO is very clear: “The single moment that sums up why this tool works for me? Automatic deadline updates. No manual adjusting – just 30 seconds and everything recalculates on its own. That alone is a massive time saver.
A delay on the client or even on our end is no longer a burdensome task of taking 30 minutes to redo the analog schedules.”
Besides that, Rick also values the clean view they can share with clients: “We do care how our clients perceive the agency as a whole and the exported versions we share have an air of professionalism which reflects positively on our brand.”