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Manymoon helps Caravan Interactive Reduce Project Management Overhead 15%
Caravan Interactive
At a Glance
What the team wanted to do:
  • Unify management of client development projects
  • Reduce overhead for managing geographically diverse teams
  • Implement project management tools that integrated with existing Google Apps infrastructure and tools
What they did:
  • Used Manymoon project management tools to create consistent and reusable project templates for common client project models
  • Used Manymoon to manage project tasks and activities with clients and team members in multiple time zones
  • Extended use of Manymoon from client management to internal development and sales channel management
What they accomplished:
  • Reduced project management overhead 10-15%
  • Able to identify and manage project resource and implementation issues in a more pro-active fashion
  • Developed a unified inception-to-completion project and client management process using Manymoon as the primary project facilitation framework
“We’ve gotten to the point where we use Manymoon for a number of internal and operational projects in a way it’s serving as both a client project management tool and a business process system for us Manymoon’s scaleable model is great for a business like ours where we need a top-shelf tool but don’t want to pay for bloated enterprise applications It’s an agile tool for our agile business.”
– Jean-Etienne LaVallee, Senior Developer/Information Architect, Caravan Interactive
The Customer

Caravan Interactive was founded in 2009 by a group of like-minded entrepreneurs and industry-tested professionals and has rapidly grown into a multimedia, web, and mobile application development powerhouse. Caravan Interactive is a team of developers, software architects and business analysts from across multiple vertical industries. Their mission is to help their clients design and implement advanced applications using the latest web and mobile frameworks.

Caravan is headquartered in New York City and has operational groups spread coast-to-coast in the continental United States with clients located from Europe to Asia and in between. Their growing client list includes traditional media, advertising, and social networking businesses. While Caravan Interactive’s roots are in rich internet application development, they saw a major sea-change toward mobile web and application development in 2010 and steered full-ahead into that exciting new market.

The Challenge

Given Caravan’s ever-changing client base, project profiles, and development teams, Caravan traditionally developed unique project management plans on a per-project basis. That worked in the short term but quickly became exhaustive and mired in redundancy.

In early 2010 Caravan began an effort to unify their development and project management processes into a consistent and reusable approach, so as to streamline their growing operations. Caravan evaluated a number of project management tools (Basecamp, OmniPlan, Trac, MS Project to name a few) and found that Manymoon best fit their needs.

“The way we were organized [before using Manymoon] was like juggling chainsaws. Manymoon’s app just made it more efficient for us… it’s really the management app we needed in a cloud-based business environment.”
– Frank McDermott, Principle Owner/Senior Strategist, Caravan Interactive
The Manymoon Solution

The two biggest factors for deciding to use Manymoon were its integration with Google Apps and its flexibility. With Manymoon, Caravan extended their already existing cloud-based infrastructure (Google Apps, DropBox, and Salesforce.com) with a project management framework that’s flexible enough for small projects all the way up to large, multi-timezone projects in a consistent process model.

Many of the other tools Caravan evaluated had very strict project management models that almost demanded that Caravan adopt one particular management style over another. For a company like Caravan, where every project and every client has a different profile and management model, having a strict adherence to one particular approach is not a good idea.

“[Manymoon]’s pretty slick… When I have to layout a whole project or just a sprint for a development team, Manymoon makes it so much easier to plan, delegate and track work… It’s infinitely better than the 4 browser tabs for CRM, bug-tracking, docs, and timesheets that I used to need.”
– Adam Shackelford, Principle Owner/CTO, Caravan Interactive

Manymoon lets Caravan choose a light-weight approach for simple projects and an encompassing, multi-phased approach for more complex projects without having to use different software.

The Manymoon Result

Caravan reported that being able to tie into their calendar, email and document management systems easily saves them 10-15% of their management overhead on projects where they would otherwise have duplication of efforts. With integrated time tracking and resource management, Caravan can easily find the daily status of team members without extraneous meetings.

In short, Manymoon makes it easier to plan, execute and track projects and lets Caravan focus on getting the job done with their clients. Internally, Caravan is also taking advantage of Manymoon as a lightweight customer relationship system (CRS) where they track both client channels as projects and manage internal initiatives all in one place. Caravan Interactive is looking forward to taking on 2011 with the right tools, thanks to Manymoon.