I am Lewis Carr, the Founding Director of AdaptiVLE. We develop online learning and training platforms and courses. Before the pandemic, all staff worked in an office, and it was easy to get an overview of the projects we were each working on and collaborate on them when needed. With the introduction of lockdowns and the need for remote working, the visibility on staff output was vastly reduced.
We needed a way to be able to quickly and clearly see where team members' time was going and identify any problems in scheduling work and meeting client deadlines. Additionally, as many of our customers were also forced into remote working patterns, we saw project deadlines begin to slip from the client side as they struggled to manage their own teams. We found ourselves taking on a lot more project management, not only for our own business but for clients too!
A tool for better managing and planning
We had used other project management software in the past, but none of them gave us the full picture we needed. ActiveCollab's reporting feature is brilliant for looking back and seeing exactly where we have used our team resources on projects, which helps us better plan future work.
The parent and child dependency function means that when a client's timescales change, we can move one parent task and easily see the impact on deadlines for the rest of the project and how it affects other work. This allows us to be much more agile and gives visibility to the team on project status.
The Workload feature is invaluable for planning tasks around the capacity of team members, ensuring nobody is allocated more work than they can handle.
ActiveCollab ensures that the operation of the business runs smoothly and takes away much of the guesswork and estimating when planning and managing workloads. It allows us to see the real impact of client demands on our time and helps us plan projects around the team's capacity.
