I led a transformation of the agency’s working structure, which resulted in greater efficiency, focus, and visibility into the agency operations.
Information in case study is summarized at a high-level to preserve confidentiality.
One of the key pain points we received from the Rose, Buds, and Thorns retrospective was: “We have too many meetings.” As Impekable grew and took on more projects of larger sizes and complexity, our weekly cadence did not scale well. Regular and ad-hoc meetings filled up weekly schedules. Our Delivery team was losing valuable Maker time and risked getting burnout. We needed to rethink the way we work.
Previously, I had led the team to structure many client projects using a dual-track agile approach with Discovery and Execution phases. However, this process needed to be refined, and not having an internal 2-week cadence made the approach harder to sustain with the rise in meetings.
For this initiative, I aimed to:
Increase Maker time
Reduce the number of meetings to enable more focus
Enable asynchronous work
Create predictable and structured meetings with clear agendas and goals to enable more asynchronous work.
Protect time for client work
Ensure the team has adequate time to do client work throughout the week.
In order to create a 2-week cadence, I wanted to review the current rituals that enabled our projects and agency to run well, and also come up with updated processes to inform the new cadence. To do this, I designed and led an ideation workshop through Miro with the cross-functional leaders to capture all the moving parts of our agency, which consisted of 3 parts: 1) Reviewing Pain Points, 2) Setting a Vision, and 3) Reviewing Needs and Parameters.
After the ideation session with Leadership, I created a visual representation of our entire agency business operations (current and future) to aid me in reimagining the 2-week cadence. Creating this “engine” also showed the complexity of the business, and why adding new initiatives required a thoughtful and strategic approach to ensure lasting change, while minimizing disruption to key workflows.
With the Agency Engine and important rituals informed by feedback and input from the team, I took on the work to reimagine the 2-week cadence. To do this, I captured a typical current week for Team leads, who had the busiest schedules as they were strategic leaders who led projects and teams directly, provided mentorship to other direct-reports, and also worked on initiatives to develop the team and agency.
If I could optimize the cadence for Team Leads, we would be able to meet the needs of other team members with less meetings.
For the new 2-week cadence, I moved all internal meetings to Friday, and changed most internal meetings to biweekly, with the goal of creating more structure and preparation time for those meetings to ensure we covered important updates at the reduced frequency, and enabling more asynchronous work between meetings. I also wanted to test out dedicated client blocks while testing out this structure to ensure adequate working time for each project was protected for team members.
After getting feedback and buy-in from the Team Leads and Executive Team (Leadership) on the updated cadence, we were ready to test drive the 2-week cadence with the agency.
Since this was a big change, we wanted to provide ample time to communicate and answer questions from the team. I created a presentation outlining the pain points related to this initiative from the retrospective, the goal, and the approach for the 2-week cadence.
I presented the concept at 2 consecutive Weekly All-Hands to give time for the team to digest the information and get questions answered before we started.
Implementing the changes included immediate and longer-term changes.
Immediate changes included having the Leadership team reschedule large internal meetings. Team leads and team members changed their 1:1 schedules to biweekly.
Longer-term changes included the client working blocks, which we were able to create with new clients by co-creating working blocks with the project teams and clients to ensure work blocks were optimized for both sides.
Over the next several months, I empowered or worked with different members of the Leadership Team to come up with an updated format for internal meetings. For example, the Lead Product Designer worked with her design team to create a new design review format, and I worked with the Project Managers to add more key information to our Projects and Time reporting to help run more efficient review meetings.
