About us:
- Consulting agency;
- 120 employees;
- More than 10 years on the market;
- More than 500 successful projects;
- Clients: Czech Post Print House, BogushTime, Water Energy, Global Security Technologies etc.
Your company should work for you, not you for it
Visotsky Consulting has been operating since 2008. Our purpose is simple — to help small and medium businesses grow. To do that, we teach entrepreneurs to manage effectively through the programme at our School for Business Owners. Visotsky Consulting operates in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, America and Taiwan.
The school for business owners is a 12-month consulting project in which we teach business founders how to manage a company. More than 500 companies have already completed it.
Why Worksection?
Below, Anastasia Melnikova explains how to choose a management system for a consulting company:
The main resources of any company are time, money and people. It is important to plan and track the employees’ working hours, keep an eye on the company’s expenses and to plan projects wisely.
For all their project work, and to manage employees, company leaders use project management software, or, more simply, task trackers.
Microsoft Planner was our first task trackerIt was simple and convenient, but we were missing integrations with the Google services the whole company uses. Then we switched to Bitrix24.
Bitrix was the hardest, since we had to hire specialists to adapt and roll it out. In the end, we spent a lot of money, a lot of effort several months adjusting and reworking the system to fit our needs. We ended up with a complicated, overloaded tool that we tried to make cover all the company’s needs: project management, marketing, and collaboration between all employees.
We needed a tool with the following features:
- simple interface could get the hang of it as quickly as possible;
- flexible structure of projects with tasks, subtasks and checklists;
- task customization: priorities, deadlines, labels, and assignees;
- planning tools: Gantt chart, Tasks boards, calendar and time tracking;
- report system — plan/actual on tasks for a week;
- Ukrainian and English interfaces to make it easy for all our branches to adapt;
- mobile application for swift feedback from employees straight from their smartphones.
Result
We considered many task trackers, but we found the right tool on the Ukrainian market. We currently use Worksection as the main tool to manage consulting projects. This is a simple and intuitive project management system at an affordable price. Due to the multilingual support, Worksection is integrated in our overseas branches.
Worksection is a Swiss Army knife in the project management kitchen
Which tools do you use?
We have strategic planning, weekly planning, and daily check-ins at various levels, depending on the department. In Worksection, we run all of the company’s projects, and the following tools help with this:
- Calendar
For our company’s team, integration with Google Calendar was very important. The Worksection calendar is where we plan regular activities and coordinate work, and once it’s synced, all the data shows up in employees’ personal Google calendars.
Worksection Calendar
Synchronization with Google Calendar
- Task list
Worksection helps in monitoring a person’s workload. When we can see how many tasks an employee has on a project, we can estimate how much more work they can take on.
- Priorities
We actively use task priorities. In Worksection, we can set a task priority from 1 to 10, but we have chosen a simple gradation of priorities:
1 — for regular tasks;
5 — for simple tasks;
10 — that need to be done urgently.
- Gantt Chart
For a clear, visual work plan, we use the Gantt chart. It does a great job of visualizing task deadlines within one project. Besides showing the planned deadlines, the chart lets you manage them easily.
- Reports
Every week, we look at the total number of tasks in each project, how many were completed the previous week, and the number of urgent tasks in the project. We pull all the data from the reports in Worksection.
Data privacy and dealing with clients
First, we find out whether our clients use task trackers. If they do, we add that client to Worksection. To make the client company’s work visible to us, we join their projects. This way, we can track their progress, analyze the client’s activities, set tasks for them and participate in discussions.
The privacy in Worksection really helps. All confidential data and internal projects of our company are hidden from the client. The privacy settings are very flexible, and each task may be hidden from a specific group of people.
Who would you recommend Worksection to?
I would recommend introducing Worksection to all owners of small and medium businesses. At the stage of having at least 2 managers in charge of the company’s evolution, the sequence, deadlines and even tasks tend to be forgotten. Not only does Worksection remember all project-related information, it also makes it possible to analyze the company’s performance.
Good project planning helps steer a team toward hitting precise targets.