I developed and implemented a strategy to optimize agency operations through better structure and visibility, and team empowerment.
Information in case study is summarized at a high-level to preserve confidentiality.
As Impekable grew over the years, the agency went from mostly generalists, with designers and engineers owning the entire client relationship and project from start to finish, to a team of specialists with dedicated sales, project managers, and account managers. During this time, our people ops and finance departments had also grown to meet the needs of the larger agency. This fast-paced growth eventually created silos and inefficiencies, which was exacerbated by being a 100% remote company.
In an effort to create a more alignment and improved operations, in January 2021, the agency reorganized to consolidate the Design, Project Management, and Engineering teams to a single Delivery Team that reported to me.
For a growing agency, there could have been endless areas to tackle first. Since client projects were the core of our agency work, we decided to focus on improving operations along our project lifecycle. Specifically, we wanted to understand how we could enable our team to deliver work more smoothly, knowing that anything upstream - from project initiation to delivery - could help or hinder the process.
In order to answer this question, I aimed to gather feedback and insights from the Delivery Team (those doing the client work), and all other cross-functional departments (Sales, Account Management, People Ops, Finance) who strategize, coordinate with, and support the Delivery team to ensure a healthy business.
I defined the following metrics to guide my discovery process. I would be successful if I was able to:
Understand the team's key pain points and blockers.
I needed to identify challenges or roadblocks that were impacting our team's ability to do good work and deliver projects on time and on budget. What could our team use more support with?
Identify what's going well, and capture opportunities for process improvement.
What positive approaches could we continue to build on? What workarounds were the team already doing? What ideas did they have based on their experience working on projects?
Define an Operations Strategy rooted in the Delivery Team's experience.
A desired outcome would be to define and prioritize initiatives based on their impact on improving team efficiency, focus, team happiness, and profitability.
I ran a remote Rose, Buds, and Thorns retrospective workshops through Miro with the Delivery team and the Executive team, which consisted of Sales, Account Management, Finance, and People Ops. I ran the workshops separately to ensure the team felt safe to share their candid pain points and suggestions.
From there, I synthesized feedback into key points in order to maintain anonymity, and corresponded them with their associated project phase. I then grouped issues into larger themes and marked them as urgent, important, and less urgent in terms of impact to the overall project delivery. In this case, spending more time upfront to prepare projects would lead to improved downstream effects, so I prioritized pain points and needs at the project initiation phase.
I then synthesized the Urgent themes into key operational pillars to clearly communicate focus areas that would enable the team to deliver projects more smoothly. I included actions and desired outcomes based on team provided ideas. Since any improvement required cross-functional effort, together, we prioritized and finalized the actions, then organized them into quarterly goals in our project management tool to continue driving forward.
