DataJoe Triples Their Project Capacity and Increases Revenues by 23%

At a Glance

• Improve team communication, especially around completion of tasks and projects, so that everyone could work to maximum capacity
• Develop a solution for managing projects at various stages
• Find an easy-to-use (and fun) solution that would encourage the team to get on board

• Centralized all project information in Manymoon; one portal where they could track all information, tasks, attachments
• Communicated project updates and comments via Manymoon rather than over email
• Discussed big ideas and ways to develop their company in weekly team meetings, rather than discussing project next steps

• Completed more projects in first quarter of Manymoon than had in prior three quarters
• Meet more aggressive deadlines--projects are effectively completed on deadline
• Taking on more work than before Manymoon, growing their business by 30% due to increased productivity

DataJoe develops technology products for business and trade journals, including research tools, e-commerce applications, data-to-print utilities and an online marketplace of locally-collected industry research. They have 80 clients located all over the United States and in Canada. As a small company with clients on a national scale, it is imperative that they are all working to their maximum capacity and projects are managed efficiently. The team consists of 7 people, with several members of the team working remotely. Given their mobile and remote team, it was crucial that they had a resource that allowed them to easily stay on task with the various projects they work on collaboratively.

The team knew which projects needed to be tackled and understood they would have to work effectively to achieve their goals. The biggest issue they faced was communication: Each person would do their own tasks and projects, but when tasks and projects overlapped and others needed to know a task was completed, they had a break-down in their process.

Before Manymoon, DataJoe communicated by e-mail because it was the easiest way to notify all persons involved in a project about a task completion, especially when some project members worked off-site. But projects would linger simply because e-mail wasn't always the best method for keeping track of the stages of the project. It was hard for team members to know when they were supposed to be involved in a project or whether someone else had completed a task they were waiting on. Because of this, they missed deadlines. They had tried using Google Calendar to manage every one's time, and had even created an internal portal for viewing productivity based upon calendar appointments, but it was often hard for everyone to remember to add their meetings, tasks and reminders to the calendar and quickly become too difficult to manage and remember to use effectively.

When first reviewing Manymoon, they were initially intrigued by its easy-to-use interface. After reviewing many other time-management tools, Manymoon seemed fun and flexible, especially for a small company with a youthful work-force. Getting people to take a look and "play around" in Manymoon was easy. DataJoe knew it would be a tool that would work for their team - everyone enjoyed learning the system and all the tools that were available.

The first thing DataJoe did was set up projects and assign different tasks to team members in Manymoon. They created milestones with deadlines and individual tasks to each milestone. Then they e-mailed everyone involved when there were any updates or comments. When people were finished or had something to comment on a particular task, they would add the comments in Manymoon rather than via e-mail. The team now logs into Manymoon daily to keep on top of projects and assigned tasks as well as to share documents and schedules. It allows them to collaborate on projects that they are working on much more simply.

DataJoe loved having the ability to share projects among other team members, with one portal where they could see the status of any task or milestone. No longer did they have to go to two places to gain access to documents. Manymoon’s Google integration allowed them to attach these documents that were already in use to Manymoon projects and really helped centralize all of the work they were doing. Being able to integrate their Google Docs and Google Calendars into Manymoon allowed the DataJoe team to really expand upon the tools they were already using and connecting these documents and calendars to projects and tasks in Manymoon made everything more easy to manage.

By the very first project managed using Manymoon, they hit their deadline! This was a complete turnaround from the projects the team had tackled in the past. DataJoe is now taking on much more work since using Manymoon, simply because the margins around completing tasks and projects has decreased. Projects no longer linger, they get finished, and finished on time. This has allowed them to tackle more projects in the first quarter of the year than they might have finished in three and increased revenue by 23%!