Recently, iART experienced exponential growth while striving to meet increasing demands for flexibility and continuous project changes. In the fall of 2019, iART looked to Tempus Resource as a reliable resource planning tool that could also serve as a foundation for ongoing business optimizations.
“Innovation, by nature, means you cannot plan everything in advance.”
-Christian Rickenbacher, iART
iART has a truly unique business model. The international studio for media architecture, located in Basel, Switzerland, is comprised of highly specialized artists, engineers, and technicians.
When it comes to resource management at iART, resource substitution is extremely complex. And they require ultimate flexibility for resources who bring diverse skill sets to multiple, concurrent projects.
With the past year’s exponential growth and new client demands for more project flexibility and changes, iART needed a powerful resource management tool. Adding to their complex needs, iART’s project portfolio contained a large number of heterogeneous skill sets and competencies.
Christian Rickenbacher, iART’s Process Manager, explained the firm’s challenge of balancing continuous innovation with resource planning. “Our ongoing challenge is to be as flexible as possible, as well as capable of reacting to changes, particularly when it comes to resource planning.”
Their resource management transformation began with optimizing the process landscape. Once that was underway, “we quickly realized that without a resource management tool, we wouldn’t reach the finish line.”
In the fall of 2019, iART looked to Tempus Resource as a reliable resource planning tool that could also serve as a foundation for ongoing business optimizations. “We explicitly decided not to look at tools that dictate our path,” Rickenbacher explained.
Once iART decided they needed to first “find, define and institutionalize a governing body responsible for resource management and the project portfolio,” they let their new processes and requirements lead them to the best tool.
Faced with the limiting choice of either a one-size-fits-all solution or integrating multiple solutions, iART came to realize that the one-size-fits-all approach would have required “a lot of compromises dictated by features rather than our needs,” and multiple integrations would have created far too much complexity.
Most tools on the market today no longer fit the rapidly diversifying needs of project portfolios or the flexibility requirements of most agile organizations. Tempus Resource, however, “focuses on what iART needs most—resource planning.”
Within a few months, iART completed proof of concept and pre-implementation preparations, and went live with an initiation phase. A few optimizations later, iART was fully operational with Tempus Resource, having used the open API to seamlessly integrate with all other tools and applications. Looking back, “it’s clear that iART could not move forward in our daily operations without Tempus Resource.”
The proof of concept phase focused on testing, learning, and adapting iART’s scope to additional features and industry standards. With a core team of future power users (project owners) with varying levels of experience and willingness to test new technologies, they created fast and efficient feedback loops.
“In addition to being agile,” Rickenbacher explained, “we had to be precise regarding the outcome. We defined a basic concept with corresponding questions and a clear target. The results of each assessment went through a cost-benefit analysis, too.” All in all, iART defined requirements and targets at a very high-level. Rickenbacher sums up the first four months of going live with Tempus Resource enthusiastically. “It’s amazing how many new features have been released so far—features we would not even have thought about in the beginning, but now are able to selectively utilize.”
A tool is only as good as its level of user acceptance, which is highly dependent on benefits and ease of use. From the beginning, iART users described Tempus as “low threshold” and “easy to use as Excel.” Nevertheless, Rickenbacher emphasized that user acceptance must be constantly promoted, beyond the basics of user training. For example, listening to the optimizations that users ask for allowed iART to take immediate action and boost buy-in.
Moreover, iART realized they needed to use the tool itself to help users increase acceptance. One way they accomplished this was by sending an automated email to project owners prior to weekly meetings. By communicating resource planning needs for the next two weeks in a condensed, one-page checklist, project owners see action items and data coming from Tempus, and thereby increase their use and acceptance.
Since being fully operational with Tempus Resource for several months now, iART is seeing measurable benefits like keeping workload constant. All data is located in one centralized tool that serves as iART’s single point of truth.
“Resource management became much less abstract and much more comprehensible,” Rickenbacher states, which is making possible further optimizations for resource planning processes. “For example, we now have Tempus Resource triggering automated emails to project team members to keep track of their individual tasks. Thanks to Tempus Resource, issues with resources now become visible. Issues we had never known about in the past. We now have plenty of opportunities to further improve and advance.”
iART’s ongoing task is to ensure all users are satisfied, experiencing benefits, and adapting to new technologies, to the point where users are engaging with Tempus intuitively. “In the future,” says Rickenbacher, “we want to do complete project financial planning, since Tempus offers a good solution for that.”
The benefits of resource management are available and accessible to every organization type and size, and stand to significantly impact the what, when, and how of corporate operations. Resources are our most valuable asset and are the true critical path of projects and portfolios. Pressures and bottlenecks will continue to increase, especially as work shifts to remote and requires even more oversight to ensure the right resources on the right tasks at the right time. Ultimately, it’s human nature to do our best at work we are good at, work that is meaningful. iART is a shining example of how resource management helps leverage that desire and capitalize on our best work.
Named Gartner Cool Vendor 2016, Tempus Resource is a real-time resource management software that uses powerful ‘What-if’ simulations to model project data. It helps organizations of any size, of any level of project management maturity, to make risk-free, data-driven resource decisions.
Contact ProSymmetry for a free Tempus Resource trial or demo.
© 2026 ProSymmetry. All Rights Reserved.
Tempus Portfolio is a trademark and ProSymmetry, Tempus Resource, and Tempus Insight+ are a registered trademarks of ProSymmetry LLC.
