Challenge

Cashmere Agency, the world’s first culture agency™ who builds authentic campaigns with a mix of marketing and public relations strategies, needed a tool to ensure client projects were being allocated and staffed properly, while also effectively managing employees’ time and workloads across multiple clients, projects, and teams.

When COVID sent all employees home in early 2020, the need to track resources became even more vital. Agency leaders were no longer seeing and engaging in person with employees on a daily basis, which deprived managers of the ability to gauge employee time management and negatively impacted the efficiency with which client projects were being completed.

Throughout the pandemic, Cashmere continued to grow and receive accolades for its work, including being named one of Ad Age’s 2020 “A-List Agencies to Watch” in April of that year. Cashmere leadership saw a need for a resource portfolio management platform to help them estimate new client demands and budgets, properly staff projects, and ensure employees were being sufficiently utilized but not overworked.

Solution

Tempus Resource by ProSymmetry is a purpose-built resource portfolio management solution providing many Fortune 500 companies with resource forecasting and capacity planning capabilities to help make strategic decisions for their businesses. Tempus gives PMO leadership actionable intelligence, cutting-edge analytics, and real-time scenario analysis.

Tempus Resource was an ideal fit for Cashmere, as the agency needed a platform to help track client contractual agreements and budgeted plans versus actual figures, employee time, and overall profitability for the agency. When pitching new business, Sabrina Beneroso, Resourcing Director for Cashmere, was always asked “Do we have the bandwidth for this?”

Benefits

Cashmere now uses Tempus for a variety of tasks. Beneroso frequently runs burn reports in Tempus to analyze how the agency planned to staff a project versus how it’s actually progressing. “What I really like about Tempus is that we have three different data sets that we can keep completely separate but we’re still able to integrate them in our analysis.” Beneroso values having a contractual data set, “because that gives us a starting point with a client. We go into a project with the intention of having certain people working at a particular rate, and when it’s executed according to that plan, it works with our budget and the deliverables that we have to provide for our clients.”

Beneroso’s second data set involves having project managers make adjustments on the demand side to account for changes on clients’ schedules and weeks when there is more lift than others. This second data set gives the Cashmere project management team an opportunity to make changes and track them as well as assess bandwidth based on the reality of what it is taking to do the work.

Cashmere’s third data set is the actuals that are going toward timesheets. This set is important for finance and resourcing teams to assess and compare against the first contractual data set to evaluate profitability. “Tempus gives us visibility into a lot of different things: how people are actually working, our contractual information (which is what we originally thought we’d need for the project), and it also gives us a platform that allows us to have up-to-date data on what our resourcing forecast is going to be.” With the hard data that Tempus provides the agency, they are able to turn around and use the data to better assess resourcing for future projects.

Tempus Timesheets also help Cashmere with utilization reports and when scoping new work for the agency. Beneroso adds, “I can aggregate timesheet data into utilization reports that give us insight into availability, the rate at which our teams are working, and ultimately help us manage and maintain a balanced workload for all employees.”

Tempus’s Bulk Project Allocation Flatgrid plays an important role in Cashmere’s analysis and decisionmaking. Beneroso uses the tool mainly to run reports for Cashmere’s leadership team to compare contractual allocations with real-time utilization and output. “We use Tempus’s Flatgrid to isolate specific projects and give the account lead and project manager on that particular project a report of how we’re burning against our budget. From there, we try to create some accountability on that team and ask them to let us know if we’re burning hot or under, just temporarily or if this is something that’s going to continue throughout the project and ask them to help us come up with a solution to bring down the overburn, or if we need to make some adjustments. If we anticipate a project is not taking us a lot of time to complete, then we can work on more deliverables for the client.” Tempus also helps department leads more effectively manage their teams. Beneroso continues, “Tempus helps department leads see how their teams are working. We can utilize Tempus to show employees’ actual bandwidth. If people are working very long hours, that is something we need to address, and we can see that information in this utilization report from Tempus, and make department leads aware of it.”

When onboarding a new client, Tempus plays a crucial role for Cashmere’s decision making. “With Tempus, I can give our agency leadership information on how much employee resources the project will take. Tempus is very helpful with pricing whenever we are bringing in a new project. I tell my team to go into Tempus, create the project, put their hours on the demand side, and once they are done, I can complete my estimate. Before Tempus, I would have to price each project manually.” Before Tempus, estimating how much employee time would need to go into a new project involved sending multiple emails and requesting staffing forms, and Beneroso having to complete pricing analysis offline. “Now, I tell project leaders to go into Tempus, enter their demand allocations, and when they are done, I can price it and let leadership know what the estimate is.”

With so many employees working remotely over the past few years, Tempus has played a more integral role with Cashmere’s resource management demands. Beneroso explains, “For me in resourcing, because I’m not part of the day-to-day client work, having information about how people are working is very helpful. I’m able to see when people are billing a lot of time to our admin code, bringing it up to their managers to say, ‘This person is not busy, they are probably not being challenged.’ Tempus analysis has been very helpful because we’re not always in the same physical space right now, we don’t see our coworkers, they are not in the next cubicle to know what they’re working on.”

Results

Implementing Tempus at Cashmere has been a game-changer for the agency, providing them with a trove of actionable data about every client, employee, and overall workflow efficiency. Beneroso explains, “We have so much more information now with Tempus. Not having a resourcing platform was challenging, because we were aggregating and maintaining several sources of documents. Now we actually have information. Before we accept a project, we know what it’s going to take to do it, and we can make more informed decisions on who to assign to a project.”

Tempus has also helped Cashmere’s leadership team take a more strategic look at how the firm was running. “There were a lot of revelations out of Tempus when we began, especially for our brand side. We were under the impression that the work was a lot more steady than it really is. In reality, there are a lot more ups and downs, which is helping us create efficiencies,” comments Beneroso. Tempus has provided beneficial information to Cashmere leadership and helps them set expectations to correct some areas where they can grow and work as a team to look for solutions. “Tempus has been very helpful for our agency. It’s a tool that allows you to be very collaborative. I can have members of my team, finance, and agency leadership go into Tempus and see the analysis for themselves.”

Tempus provides Cashmere’s resourcing team with valuable data around staff time. “Tempus is very helpful, especially for shorter-term projects, because we now have a workflow around it. If we have a project that is 2.5 to 3 months, we staff it on a weekly basis, trying to anticipate the schedule. With Tempus, we’re able to go in and reforecast and rethink the project and what might be needed. Often, our project managers will look at the actuals and then ask employees, ‘This work, what is it actually taking you?’ The information then informs my forecast. This assists us tremendously with integrated workflow as we’ve had more project managers join our team in the past year.”

With nationwide staffing issues businesses are experiencing due to the pandemic, and the “Great Resignation,” Tempus has enabled Cashmere to balance staffing needs and keep up with client workflow demands without any delay. Beneroso adds, “Just having the information of what we’re forecasting allows us to be more proactive in our hiring. We know now that it takes longer to onboard people and there are not as many people looking for work right now. Hiring is a longer process because the talent pool is smaller. We’re trying to be very proactive in our forecasts in Tempus because it helps us see which roles we need to prioritize to keep up with our pipeline.”

Cashmere has benefitted from Tempus’s proactive and engaged Customer Success Team and their willingness to tackle each client’s problems with a unique focus on their needs. “The Prosymmetry team is incredibly responsive, usually providing us with an insightful, same day response to our questions. Sometimes I ask questions about what the workflow could be for a particular task, and they can suggest how other clients work efficiently within Tempus. The Customer Success Team at Prosymmetry gives us a lot of insight on how best to use the tool.”

Cashmere’s implementation of Tempus went smoothly for the agency, helping make the tool more productive from the ground running. Beneroso adds, “I had used Tempus previously at another agency, so I was familiar with the platform. We are using more Tempus features, and the Prosymmetry team has been great at walking us through new features and all the different settings.” With many tools and reports in Tempus being tailored to each client, Cashmere was able to use the resource management tool more effectively. “Tempus is very highly customizable. I like that we can customize what level of access we want to give each user to our sensitive data.”

“Implementing Tempus has really been a great experience for our agency,” adds Beneroso. “The tool has helped us to become smarter, more precise with resourcing and our business.” Beneroso continues, “We looked into many different tools. What makes Tempus so unique is the fact that it seems as though it’s been thought through for different users. When you look at resourcing tools, they are only about managing people’s time, and who can I put in this slot, not really thinking about what budgets are, or how my finance team is going to look at this.

The timekeeping with some tools is very weak, and some share with employees what their allocations are supposed to be. I don’t understand how you can have accurate timekeeping when you are telling employees how much time they should be working on the project. It’s necessary to our agency workflow to have accurate numbers about how long employees take on every project, so we can have accurate forecasting. Just the fact that Tempus allows us to have all these different data sets, it’s as if the platform was thought to be more comprehensive and not just a resourcing tool that only schedules people.”

What is Tempus Resource?

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.