Audience measurement company shares updates within projects and tracks tasks in progress
“I haven’t used any PM software for a while and GanttPRO made it pretty easy to get back in.”
A story about 3M3A keeping complex, long-term projects transparent for clients and easy to track internally with GanttPRO.
Company overview
Company: 3M3A
Role interviewed: Christopher O’Hearn, Project Director
Project types: audience measurement projects, long setup and tender timelines up to 2 years
External pressures: long planning horizon (including multi-year tenders), multiple stakeholders, dependency-driven timelines that change over time
Tool history: Spreadsheets
Problems hinted at: spreadsheets taking too long to create a plan in, too complicated view to clients, need an easy way to share updates and track progress on critical dependencies
Summary
Company Background
What does your company focus on?
3M3A was founded in 2015 with the aim to support and manage TV, radio, and online audience measurement. We research media ratings: how many people watch programs or listen to the radio. It’s a very narrow specialist area. We tend to operate between industry groups, for example, between a group of broadcasters or advertising agencies who joined together, and so on.
3M3A can boast of having rich experience in different regions including Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and the Middle East. The company treats each environment as unique because working models can't be applied with the same success everywhere. 3M3A applies the best global practices and helps stakeholders adapt to market needs.
"GanttPRO has made my project management processes a lot easier in comparison with what I’ve done in the past."
Struggle
How did your approach look before GanttPRO?
I haven’t used any PM software for a while and with GanttPRO, it was pretty easy to get back in. I used some PM tools before including MS Project and some others. But they were not something I need. They all were complicated. I know that GanttPRO has features like those complicated tools have.
However, what I like about GanttPRO is that it’s fairly pared down. It’s very obvious.
On a project that I was doing earlier, my colleague asked me to create a Gantt chart and send it. I showed GanttPRO and he was surprised. He said: “I used a spreadsheet before and it took me a day. But then, you never understand what you have done and, eventually, never look at it."
Now, I use GanttPRO, where it’s very easy to set up a Gantt chart and my clients can actually understand it easily
Solution
I and my clients like the ability to share URLs: to get it exported, to be able to see it and even see the updates as well as be able to change some of the views.
I use this feature during updates within current projects. I often work with several different people involved in the project. So, usually I coordinate the project and whenever I make updates, I send out the link and we know what we are working on.
A couple of my clients asked me: “Oh, where did you get it from?” They have been quite impressed by GanttPRO.Usually, our projects are not complicated in the sense of a large number of tasks. They’re about dozens of tasks, not hundreds. But some of the dependencies are critical and it’s very important to be able to track what happens. In GanttPRO, I can easily track tasks and project progress.
