Case Study

Project management tool customizations deliver new control over agency workflow

The client

My employer was an interactive agency providing web services to universities and large corporations. My employer's biggest client often had multiple people in several time zones submitting quick-turnaround requests.

The problem

My employer and their client had both identified the need for a more formalized project management system to replace an endless stream of emails.

How we met

My employer hired me to augment their web production capabilities, and specifically to help serve the growing needs of their largest client. During the course of my employment, I participated in several major production and project management initiatives.

My solution

I identified Trac as an open-source project management tool that would fit our needs, and worked with our system administrator to get it up and running. I worked with the client and the internal team to understand and document the desired review and approval process, and wrote a custom workflow for the tool based on our decisions. For lack of a back-end developer to dedicate to the project, I wrote several customizations to the tool using the jQuery framework to make the tool look and behave as desired. I led client and internal training sessions on the use of the tool, optimized the tool's built-in reporting system for internal and client use, spearheaded integration with a version control system, and provided ongoing internal and external support.

The outcome

Internal and external users of the tool gained unprecedented visibility into workload, workflow, and project bottlenecks. My employer was able to document the progress of projects, and the client was able to monitor that progress without time-intensive correspondence with project managers.