How KWI Used ClickTime’s Resource Management to Enable Rapid Growth

Backstory: Helping Businesses Navigate COVID-Era Communications

KWI is a communications and management consulting agency helping clients drive lasting business results by putting people at the center of business. Specializing in both internal and external communication, KWI offers a variety of services, including change management, employee engagement, corporate communications, external public relations, digital media, brand reputation and more.

Soon after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, KWI experienced a sharp increase in demand for its services, as businesses across industries scrambled to adapt to and navigate an ever-changing situation. Both new and existing clients turned to KWI for support, expertise and, in many cases, simply an extension of their teams.

As KWI took on more projects and built partnerships with new clients, the team began to grow, and the agency sought new ways to expand its workforce quickly, scalably and profitably without sacrificing its characteristic, highly valued client service.

Assessing the Status-Quo: Gaining Visibility into the Overall Health of the Agency

As with any business seeking to scale, it’s critically important to ensure an organization and its teams run as efficiently as possible, eliminating cumbersome processes to maximize existing headcount and productivity.

Having used ClickTime for years to track project hours, labor costs, and client billing, KWI turned to its timesheet data to evaluate agency efficiency.

Whitney Sinkule, Group Senior Project Manager at KWI, was heavily involved in the data analysis. “ClickTime has all the reports we need,” Sinkule states. “Their custom reporting options are better than any other time management system I’ve used.”

After creating the necessary reports, Sinkule quickly identified potential areas of opportunity for KWI.

Streamlining Capacity Planning

How KWI used software to streamline project planning, increase visibility into employee capacity, and stick to client budgets.

Historically a boutique-sized agency, KWI maintained processes unique to each department based on what worked best for individual teams and their clients. However, as KWI grew into a mid-sized firm, consistent, scalable processes became key to increase operational efficiency.

“Most managers used spreadsheets to track employee capacity. Rather than having a centralized location to view employee availability, they’d just ask employees what they were working on,” Sinkule recalls.

After learning about KWI’s goals and opportunities, the Customer Success team at ClickTime recommended Resource Management – ClickTime’s tool that helps agencies allocate staff to projects.

Immediately, the benefits became apparent.

The tool provided KWI leaders with a centralized way to view capacity across the agency. As visibility increased, leaders were able to allocate resources more quickly and with greater accuracy without needing to invest additional time to coordinate staffing. Hours previously spent managing and understanding availability were redirected toward addressing rapidly growing client needs.

“Instead of planning employee capacity in disparate spreadsheets, our entire staff was finally using the same system,” Sinkule recalls. “Now, when we need to know who is available to take on more work, we don’t need any side conversations–we just take a look in Resource Management.”

With Resource Management, KWI was also able to balance workloads across its teams and assign new project opportunities with even greater confidence.

“With ClickTime, we’re able to see who has capacity to work on another project, or who is overallocated and needs help,” explained Sinkule.

Spending Less Time Creating Project Plans

COVID-19 created a need for increased adaptability for businesses across industries, including KWI. With Resource Management, KWI was able to place its forecasted project costs, billings, and timelines into a single system of record and quickly alter project plans as workloads fluctuated.

“Creating project plans in Resource Management is a breeze. It saves us dozens of hours of administrative work each month,” says Sinkule

With Resource Management, KWI can also clearly map out how employees ought to spend their time to achieve client objectives within budget. Managers allocate project hours to employees, who view these assigned hours in their timesheet dashboard.

With reports that show every project’s remaining labor hours, KWI’s managers can monitor their team’s progress in real-time, minimizing the chance that budgets are overdrawn.

“ClickTime alerts our managers when their budgets are nearly depleted,” Sinkule says. “When we overservice, it’s on purpose, as an investment in our clients.”

Scaling Up: Growing Headcount to Just the Right Size

To accurately scale its hiring efforts as the organization and its client base grew, KWI leveraged ClickTime to make data-driven decisions informed by accurate forecasting.

With pre-built reports, KWI can see:

• How many hours past projects took to complete.

• The average number of monthly project hours each employee logged.

• The percentage of time spent on non-billable tasks.

• The upcoming pipeline i.e., the number of client project hours booked.

• Individual and org-wide utilization rates (as defined by “Billable Hours/Total Working” hours).

• Total monthly billings, and how everyone is pacing toward their individual goals.

• The average number of billable hours logged by different roles.

The Result: KWI Scales to Mid-Sized Agency

With increased efficiency and a data-backed growth plan, KWI was able to hire the number of employees needed to meet the COVID-era demands and more.

“ClickTime played a big role in our growth,” says Sinkule. “I can’t tell you how needed this software is; I don’t know how other companies manage without it!”