Whether it’s updating content on channel partners’ websites automatically or targeted marketing campaigns, the SharedVue platform has the ability to adjust to and enhance channel marketing strategies to increase leads and sales. And they’re using LiquidPlanner to manage their work. We talked to Matt Nisonger, SharedVue’s director of IT, and asked him how LiquidPlanner has made a difference to their productivity and PM processes.
LiquidPlanner: What main pain points were you looking to address with a new project management tool?
Matt Nisonger: We build web software; we’re similar to LiquidPlanner in that respect. We’re a very busy shop. We’ve doubled in size, and we needed the ability to look across multiple clients or projects in a single view (which is very important for resource scheduling.) We needed to increase throughput and become more efficient.
We face daily multiple deadlines across multiple clients. We need to be responsive to our clients and operate like an agency and never miss a deadline. To do that we needed reporting features that would allow us to see where resources are allocated—and where they would need to be committed, say 2-4 weeks out.
Our goal was to streamline and organize projects with transparency across all teams, and also to create a central place to collaborate.
LP: Why did you choose LiquidPlanner?
MN: LiquidPlanner stood out against other platforms because it can quickly show when a task or project is at risk. It puts all project work into a single view—so you can look at people’s availability and time committed to every project and see where the risk is.
LiquidPlanner is unique in how it organizes information—it allows you to view the same info in different contexts. For example, account managers want to see how work is organized across types of tasks, which solves the “context paradigm.”
People here can’t imagine how we got things done before LiquidPlanner. We used to use simple lists of tasks with no way to accurately gauge how much work there really was. Now, people come into the office and know exactly what is planned for the day and what they have to do. Plus, all related files for each project and task can be found in LiquidPlanner—before it as a mashup of emails, Basecamp, spreadsheets.
LP: Can you give us an example of how LiquidPlanner has accelerated team performance?
MN: Prior to LiquidPlanner, when there was an urgent client need, the information would get taken immediately from the account manager right to the tech person, and that person would be responsible for juggling everything inside a silo.
Not only are they distracting, but random requests skew our priorities.
This scenario plays out frequently. Now, no matter how urgent the request, it gets put into LiquidPlanner and we have a group process for managing them. If programmers are getting hit with too many requests, we can pull them out of their coding zone.
One other great benefit of LiquidPlanner has been our ability to hire people faster because we have better long term visibility to where resources are needed. We can provide a clear justification for the need to upper management.
LP: What impact can easy-to-use online project management have on fast-growing companies like SharedVue?
MN: Because LiquidPlanner is so easy to use, it enables the people doing the work to quickly communicate status with the person who actually needs it most, skipping the middle layer of management. This not only saves time and resources, but workers can go right to their tasks and get up to speed immediately—and they don’t need to wait for a project manager for instruction.
That means they spend the majority of time scoping work and doing it—and much less time planning and structuring the agreement.
With LiquidPlanner, it’s easy to communicate status up and down the chain. We enforce the hell out of it—everyone updates their status because now we can.
About SharedVue
Everything Channel’s content syndication and marketing automation platform—SharedVue—ensures channel partners are promoting the most relevant, up-to-date marketing, product and promotional content available through their existing websites, all while capturing sales leads and nurturing them into sales.
Channel vendors are able to use SharedVue to make global content updates on all partner websites, improve metrics and tracking, quickly set up for new promotions and more easily integrate other marketing enablement programs. For channel partners, this eliminates the need to constantly update their websites. For channel vendors, it means seamless updating and control over product and solution offerings with measurable ROI on a global channel scale.