TribalScale is a global digital innovation firm helping to pave the way for businesses to thrive in the digital world. They work with a diverse list of companies, such as iHeartRadio, Nissan and John Hancock to create cutting-edge solutions and empower teams through hands-on Agile transformation.
In the five years since its inception, TribalScale has shipped over 250 projects and reached more than 50 million people with their products and services.
TribalScale also shares their expertise on technology and Agile Transformation through blogs and a podcast. You can follow them on Medium and Twitter.
As TribalScale gained more clients and secured more projects, they needed to provide important information for more clients and continue tracking a number of KPIs to understand the health of their growing business.
They used a resource planning tool solely to manage their allocation plans, alongside several spreadsheets which recorded details to share with each client, such as project budgets, time worked, and allocations.
We are constantly balancing what types of projects we have coming up with what types of people we need to help build those products. That whole piece is a massive part of our business - managing allocations and hiring.
But while their resource allocation was planned in one tool, the project-related client and financial information was kept separate in another.
Every end-of-month would consist of the Chief Revenue Officer, Project Coordinator and multiple Project Managers going back-and-forth inputting data from one tool to another, getting approval, going back, and repeating the process. The use of multiple tools made data collection for client invoices a gruelling and convoluted process - taking valuable time away from their jobs.
On the hunt for a new solution, TribalScale needed to unify their daily resourcing operations with the weekly and monthly reporting needs for their clients and senior management team.
As a project services company, TribalScale has benefited from being able to visualise allocation gaps and cliffs across their entire project portfolio in Runn. This has proven especially useful as many of their projects tend to end on the same day, with Chief Revenue Officer, Rich Gigante, saying "Our projects are fluid. We live in Runn because our allocations are constantly changing."
They’ve particularly enjoyed Runn’s capacity charts, which update in real-time as they build out their plans and adjust them. The charts also highlight the most ideal time to hire for specific roles or if people need to be shifted from one project to another.
The capacity planning chart really changed things for us. Being able to drill into a team and see where the cliffs are has been a huge benefit.
Runn’s built-in timesheets make it a breeze for TribalScale to compare their plans with actuals, and the Missing Timesheets report means their project coordinators know instantly who needs to submit their timesheets.
Not only is gathering the data a much quicker task, converting this into client invoices has become much quicker too. With their ‘paired programming’ way of working, tracking billable and non-billable hours has become essential.
I use the Missing Timesheets report for billing purposes during month-end reporting and to make sure that the team updates their hours on a day-to-day basis.
With Runn, TribalScale gets reporting on a project-, person-, and business-level. They use these reports to not only understand the day-to-day tracking of projects, but also the bigger picture.
I go to Runn to look at the status of a given project, where we are at with a client, whether we are tracking towards a particular business goal, the utilisation or billability rate of the team - basically the health of the team and the business.
Since implementing Runn, TribalScale has gained a better understanding of their resource allocations and significantly reduced their invoicing process each month from 4 days to 2 hours.
Runn is essential to what we do on a day-to-day basis. It provides a clearer picture into what everyone's working on and makes it much easier for us to move things around.
