Fileroom is a digital strategy and content creation agency that helps teams boost sales, attract engaged prospects, and delight current customers. Their organization tackles content from a fresh lens, paying close attention to the customer and potential customer’s buying journey to unify content and flow, which helps businesses close more deals and increase revenue. Fileroom also specializes in digital enablement across CRM, CMS, and lead management solutions.

The Challenge

Before Fileroom had a project management system in place, they were transitioning to a growth agency model. Along with this transition came restructuring and an assessment of all tools in place. Before finding Hive, they were using Salesforce Field Service, which helped their team prioritize projects, assign jobs, and automate basic business processes. But this tool wasn’t built for long-term sustainable growth on the team.

Additionally, individual employees at Fileroom used disparate tools, and the lack of cohesion was hampering productivity. For example, they implemented Jira for product development tasks, but quickly realized that they needed a tool with comprehensive project management capabilities. Specifically, they needed something to track all of their projects and tasks while hosting all information on one cohesive platform.

Finally, the biggest necessity for their team: resourcing. As an agency, they have a team of freelancers that they assign tasks as they come up for their clients. The tool they chose absolutely needed a robust resourcing functionality that could help their leadership team track bandwidth and specialties across their freelancer portfolio.

The Solution

When Fileroom heard about Hive, they knew that they’d found the solution to their resourcing and project management woes. Hive’s sleek design coupled with it’s array of relevant features made it a winner straight away. Let’s take a look at how the Fileroom team breaks down their work in Hive.

Setting Up Their Workspace

In Fileroom’s Hive workspace, they sort projects into two sections: “Content Shop” projects, and “Agency Services.” Under Agency Services, they have one master project for each account, under which they’ve got sub-projects like “Content” and “SEO.” When their team started using Hive, and breaking their work out into these neat projects and subtasks, they immediately noticed increased productivity across the board. Teammates loved that they could comment on individual cards to talk back and forth about action items or updates — this helped streamline efforts and decrease any confusion about projects, action items, or due dates.

They also heavily utilized Project Homepage, which was their home base for all project updates, files and uploads, and client details. This was especially helpful as they have several people working in and out of projects throughout their lifespan — this allowed team members to get up and running quickly.

Since Fileroom operates like an agency, proofing was also invaluable to their workflow, as it allows them to communicate on document details without having to send drafts back and forth via email. Next up for proofing? They hope to bring agency clients into Hive as external collaborators to make the approval and proofing process even more seamless.

Resourcing Saves The Day

As previously mentioned, resourcing is a major reason Fileroom chose Hive. Since they work with dozens of freelancers, the Fileroom team uses resourcing and labels in tandem as a tracking mechanism for freelancer workload and freelancer selection. Within resourcing, each user is listed with specific skills and years of industry experience.

This makes it easy for the leadership team to quickly hop into resourcing, check current freelancers’ workload, and match the project up with the experience level and skillset that they need. Time estimates and time tracking are also a big part of their assignment process, as it ensures that they set aside the proper amount of time per project. Time tracking is then utilized for tracking time spent per client, which helps them bill clients at their hourly rates.

Progress & Time Savings

So, where does all of these new processes actually get them? The Fileroom team estimated that Hive’s features and functionalities, specifically resourcing, cuts down on busywork across the organization by 30%. This is a massive time-savings they were able to achieve via a short product rollout and buy-in from the executive team.

For the Fileroom team, the icing on the cake is Hive’s robust and flexible views. If they had to choose one view to use in perpetuity, they’d pick Gantt, as it lets them look at project progress and scope from a macro-level perspective. Gantt helps their team better plan and understand tasks and who they’re assigned to.

Overall, Hive’s invaluable project management and resourcing functionality has been critical throughout their transition to an agency model, reducing time wasted and bringing their organization closer together during lockdown.