Nicolas Journiac is the Creative Director for the Solocal Group, a digital communications group that manages several media including Pages Jaunes (French Yellow Pages), Mappy, À vendre à Louer, and many others.
Nicolas thus runs a design studio of about twenty people, some working remotely. Their main mission is to manage customized communications campaigns for their customers, key accounts, SMBs, as well as for internal campaigns.
"We mainly work in agile project mode. Before using Azendoo we managed our projects on Excel and organized our communications with email. However, we rapidly noticed that email is definitely not the right tool for communicating and Excel does not fit the needs of a dispersed team ... That's why we chose to use Azendoo just over 6 months ago" explains Nicolas.
Beyond a project management tool, Nicolas' team needed a global tool to manage their teamwork and measure the profitability of their projects to better understand where they were gaining and losing time.
"For us the release of Time Tracking within Azendoo was a real advantage. All the work of my team is centralized on the application, our communications, projects, tasks, documents. Thus, having the ability to measure the time spent on our projects without leaving Azendoo allows us to move faster and measure the profitability of our projects at a glance. On the one hand I can measure the time we spend on a project to better allocate our resources later, and on the other hand it allows me to bill our customers more clearly. Before we managed all this in Excel and it frankly wasn’t agile.”
For Nicolas’ team, a communications campaign consists of several steps, each with several employees involved. The manager in charge of the project must initially estimate the time of the different project phases and attribute an estimated time for each task.
Eventually the employees report the actual time spent on tasks. This not only increases employee accountability but it also gives the manager better project visibility.
"The most interesting part of Time Tracking in Azendoo is the analytics. The time is in itself a particularly raw value, the benefit is to have the opportunity to present, analyze and compare this data" said Nicolas.
The Azendoo application has quickly been adopted in the Solocal team."The tool is simple and effective so my staff soon realized the benefits they would gain by using it. And the time tracking feature allows me to hold my team members accountable, which for me is a real time saver!”
"I chose Azendoo because it is the perfect combination of communication and tasks. Being able to communicate in a task, or, conversely, to create a task from a conversation are essential features to our daily work. It starts around a problem, we discuss it in a subject, then create tasks and finally measure the time we spend on these tasks to either bill for time spent or to measure our efficiency. Everything is there in Azendoo, we no longer need other tools.”
Today Azendoo is the #1 tool in Nicolas’ team. "In the future I'd like Azendoo time tracking to allow us to manage the financial aspect as well in order to go through to invoicing. But overall I'm very pleased with Azendoo, its ease of use and efficiency."