Facts about the Vintage Company:
- 11 years of work
- 70 international awards
- 40+ active projects
- Team consisting of 65 persons
Evgeniy Kudryavchenko, the ideologist and co-founder of the Vintage Web Production studio, shares his secrets of project management.
How the work process is structured
Our company operates based on a fixed cost model. That means we sign a contract with the client that specifies the number of planned hours and other resources. However if the customer has board chairmen or other management groups, our experience has taught us to multiply the work time by one and a half.
If our customer has a board of directors, out time consumption will increase one-and-a-half times.
The way things work for us, we don’t sell dedicated teams. In the studio, the specialists may be involved in several projects at once so we avoid situations where a designer goes on vacation and the project grinds to a halt.
How projects are managed
The architecture of projects and tasks
The architecture of our typical project is strict and not subject to change. We have templates developed for the basic processes in Worksection: they are simply copied with deadlines shifted to fit the actual project. A team is added to the new project — it may consist of different specialists — and tasks are distributed among them.
We give all typical tasks the same template-based names across every project. This is so that any product or sales manager can quickly get their bearings in any project.
In addition, all tasks are divided and labeled by the following principles:
- by the type of work: “prototype,” “design,” “front-end,” “back-end”;
- by the source of the task: “plan” (a planned task), “bug” (a bug-fixing task), “feature” (a rework requested by the client).
To sort tasks, we mark them with labels. [We do this so that, at the end of the project, we can see which tasks our time goes into — whether we worked to plan or spent most of it reworking the client’s corrections, and how many errors the assignee made. Once this information builds up, it’s hugely valuable for analysis.
That’s why, for every manager, segmenting tasks with labels is first and foremost an analysis tool. Even if a project manager opens someone else’s project, the breakdown of time across “Plan,” “Bug,” and “Feature” will tell them exactly what kind of project it is: promo, portal, e‑commerce, a corporate or personal website. And the breakdown of time spent will tell the PM (Project Manager) who the client is — a bureaucratic corporation or a private individual — because corporations, for instance, usually eat up a lot of time on corrections and reworks.
As for the specialists, they enjoy looking at their own stats: how much time they spent overall and exactly what they spent it on. It spurs them to improve their productivity.
This time-distribution data lets Vintage run continuous, cyclical analysis at retrospectives and improve its work processes regularly.
It works like a thermometer: you open a project and immediately see the situation, the type of project, and the type of client.
Time and payroll accounting
At one point, we decided to introduce a system of grades for our employees: junior, middle, and senior. Such a system lets employees understand their prospects. To do that, we basically had to introduce time tracking in Worksection, to see how much time people spend on typical tasks. Introducing time tracking wasn’t easy, and it took about two months.
It may not always work perfectly, but overall the result satisfies everyone — both the employees and management!
If a task isn’t set in Worksection, you don’t have to do it! Because the time spent on the work won’t be recorded anywhere.
Our web studio’s specialists log the time for a task in the task manager. From the task labels, you can see exactly where the time goes in a project, and how to adjust tasks or add new ones.
Employees’ salaries are transparent and calculated by grade, based on time tracking. Top managers’ salaries are tied to their departments’ KPIs.
How work processes are systematized. Or why not Excel?
We worked our way toward building systematic processes. When the team was much smaller, we honestly wrestled with Excel sheets, emails, planning meetings, and kanban lists. At a certain point, finding a task manager became a critical necessity for our web studio, because our team had grown a lot and the number of projects had increased. Each department used something of its own. At first, the programmers and layout specialists used Jira, but since they had to communicate with the designers, that communication happened in a free, creative form, and conflicts and misunderstandings soon followed.
We needed an effective tool to systematize communication and task setting, which would satisfy both creative designers and more “formal” programmers.
Difficulties in selecting a task manager
To implement the purposes and tasks of Vintage, we tried a lot of various tools and programs. The main difficulty in the choice is to adapt the team to a definite tool rather than to make the choice “functional”.
Even if management says, “Right, from tomorrow everyone works in such-and-such product, or you’re fired!” — it won’t work.
For us it’s now a habit — like washing your hands before a meal.
Why we choose Worksection
We’ve been running projects in Worksection for several years now. For me, the huge value of this product is the ability it gives me to bring different specialists together to work on a project.
We’d tried a lot of solutions: Jira, Bitrix, Asana, Basecamp, Teamer, Planfix. We settled on Worksection. Why?
The main criterion is simplicity and clarity
If everything is simple and clear to me as the owner, then the team will figure it out quickly too. I was also drawn in by the powerful comment feed, where it was so easy to add checklists, files, screenshots, and videos, tag people, and hide comments.
The hardest thing with a task manager is getting people to start using it!
All our production staff (programmers, layout specialists, account managers, designers) work in Worksection and use it as the web studio’s task manager. Only the sales department works in Hubspot and uses Slack for communication.
The finance department and programmers use their field-specific programs with necessary specific functionalities.
Even for routine office tasks, such as buying flowers or ordering pizza, we have a dedicated branch in Worksection.
How Worksection was introduced
As for the timeframe for adaptation, basically (setting tasks, deadlines etc.), it lasts for one and a half months.
I recommend not to try to integrate all functions at once, it is better to solve one problem which is urgent right now.
Now all our new employees get connected to the system and become involved in work over a couple of days. The employees are instructed on how to work in Worksection by special guidelines. Project managers get instructed by separate guidelines.
At first, you need someone to monitor the introduction process and remind you of the action.
How different departments use Worksection
HR checks how employees log their time, using the time-frequency chart. They used to send reminders if someone forgot to do it. But now no one forgets.
Account managers actively use the Gantt chart. They shift timeframes and create related tasks. They also export project timelines to Excel for customers.
Finance and HR specialists view and analyze time reports by project and by client. From these, they get the margins on clients and projects, the efficiency of departments and employees, and the team’s workload. Finance exports the reports to Excel and works with the data there.
The studio usually doesn’t invite clients into the project tool, although Worksection allows it. But we make an exception for long-standing clients we work with on a regular basis. They have access to their own project and can see how work on their tasks is going, so we don’t need to keep putting together regular reports for them.
All correspondence with customers is always kept in writing. Even if an agreement was made verbally, it’s then duplicated in a comment on the task to put the agreement on record.
What we like about Worksection?
- The simplicity that lets the whole team (both technical and creative specialists) get up and running in the product right away
- The compact interface makes it possible to fit a lot of information on the screen. It isn’t overloaded the way 1C is.
- In many products which I tested, the speed of work irritated me. Worksection’s operation is fast, which is a great upside.
Our gain from Worksection
This tool has already been embedded in the company’s culture. It represents our established habit. Without Worksection, our efficiency would drop by about 30%.