Perera Increases Client Satisfaction by Using Manymoon with Google Apps

We’re always excited to hear how our customers solve their business challenges with Manymoon.  If you have a great story to share, let us know and we’ll feature you next.

The Customer

Perera is a digital marketing and strategy agency based in London and Oxford, UK, that offers a wide range of strategy, production and development services for projects, products and campaigns.

The Challenge

Perera was looking for a flexible, adaptable project management and tracking tool that could be easily used by a wide number of people.In most digital agencies, clients only see a small amount of the information that flows through their project, and therefore often fail to have a sufficient level of understanding of the progress being made. Perera wanted to bring transparency to the traditional agency model and offer clients the option of viewing their project details in real-time. The ideal solution would give the clients all of the information that they need and act as a full document repository, allowing clients to both stay up-to-date as well as pro-actively intervene with changes in project direction. 

The Manymoon Solution

Perera already had Google Apps enabled and wanted a tool that extended the Google Apps solution. The factors at play were:

• The ease with which the tool could capture both small and large changes
• Compatibility with Perera’s processes, including Agile development and Shyama, its in-house planning system
• Easy sharing of the tool with clients
• The ability for the tool to include not just the progress of a project, but also all of the associated documents and resources

Manymoon turned out to be the perfect match for all these requirements, due to its one-click access control which allows Perera to securely invite clients to the system. Once invited, the clients can access particular projects and tasks that contain not only progress indicators but also hold documents and comment histories.

Manymoon has made us more responsive, more open, and has played a critical role in the development of our agency.

-Paul Squires, Founder, Perera

The Manymoon Result

This level of transparency that Perera achieves with Manymoon is changing the way project teams work – making them truly accountable to the client, without account managers intermediating. Perera is “all about the customer” and Manymoon has helped them embed that philosophy deeper into the organization.The increase in customer satisfaction has been so immense that Perera now publicly markets their approach to working openly with clients. One recent client said that “it was an extremely interactive way of working, which they were truly grateful for.” 

Perera’s clients really appreciate the openness and interactivity, while employees see it as a useful way to have a much more constructive and direct dialogue with clients.

Paul Squires, Perera’s founder, reports that at least 10% of his email traffic has been absorbed by Manymoon and he sees this number increasing as Perera involves more clients – and more projects – into this way of working.

If you aren’t using Manymoon yet, check it out today!

Manymoon, Collaborative Project Consulting Win Google Contest

A little while back, we posted a blog entry telling the story of how Collaborative Project Consulting is using Manymoon and Google Apps to help lead the green revolution.

We’re very proud of this particular case study, because Manymoon is not only helping CPC work more efficiently, our social project collaboration capabilities are also helping them work in ways that weren’t possible before.

Apparently, Google agrees with us, because we just took honorable mention in a contest they ran to find the best Google Apps marketplace vendor case studies.

Below is an excerpt from their blog post on the contest:

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Other great stories were submitted by Mavenlink, Aprigo, Outright, and Manymoon.

• Mavenlink used a unique question and answer format to tell the story of Mending Limbs and how they use multiple cloud apps
• Aprigo shot a video and wrote a strong story to highlight the story of Google Apps user Bay Cove
• Outright pushed out multiple stories to tell the story of why everyone loves Google Apps and their accounting app.
• Manymoon used visuals and a straightforward story telling method to tell the story of Collaborative Project Consulting

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Thanks Google, and thanks Collaborative Project Consulting.

Ready to get more productive? Visit www.manymoon.com today!

Manymoon helps Caravan Interactive Reduce Project Management Overhead 15%

We’re always excited to hear how our customers solve their business challenges with Manymoon.  If you have a great story to share, let us know and we’ll feature you next.

The customer

Caravan Interactive was founded in 2009 by a group of like-minded entrepreneurs and industry-tested professionals and has rapidly grown into a multimedia, web, and mobile application development powerhouse. Caravan Interactive is a team of developers, software architects and business analysts from across multiple vertical industries. Their mission is to help their clients design and implement advanced applications using the latest web and mobile frameworks.

Caravan is headquartered in New York City and has operational groups spread coast-to-coast in the continental United States with clients located from Europe to Asia and in between. Their growing client list includes traditional media, advertising, and social networking businesses. While Caravan Interactive’s roots are in rich internet application development, they saw a major sea-change toward mobile web and application development in 2010 and steered full-ahead into that exciting new market.

Caravan’s Challenge

Given Caravan’s ever-changing client base, project profiles, and development teams, Caravan traditionally developed unique project management plans on a per-project basis. That worked in the short term but quickly became exhaustive and mired in redundancy.
In early 2010 Caravan began an effort to unify their development and project management processes into a consistent and reusable approach, so as to streamline their growing operations. Caravan evaluated a number of project management tools (Basecamp, OmniPlan, Trac, MS Project to name a few) and found that Manymoon best fit their needs.

“The way we were organized [before using Manymoon] was like juggling chainsaws. Manymoon’s app just made it more efficient for us… it’s really the management app we needed in a cloud-based business environment.”

– Frank McDermott, Principle Owner/Senior Strategist, Caravan Interactive

Solution

The two biggest factors for deciding to use Manymoon were its integration with Google Apps and its flexibility. With Manymoon, Caravan extended their already existing cloud-based infrastructure (Google Apps, DropBox, and Salesforce.com) with a project management framework that’s flexible enough for small projects all the way up to large, multi-timezone projects in a consistent process model.

Many of the other tools Caravan evaluated had very strict project management models that almost demanded that Caravan adopt one particular management style over another. For a company like Caravan, where every project and every client has a different profile and management model, having a strict adherence to one particular approach is not a good idea.

“[Manymoon]’s pretty slick… When I have to layout a whole project or just a sprint for a development team, Manymoon makes it so much easier to plan, delegate and track work… It’s infinitely better than the 4 browser tabs for CRM, bug-tracking, docs, and timesheets that I used to need.”

– Adam Shackelford, Principle Owner/CTO, Caravan Interactive

Manymoon lets Caravan choose a light-weight approach for simple projects and an encompassing, multi-phased approach for more complex projects without having to use different software. Caravan reported that being able to tie into their calendar, email and document management systems easily saves them 10-15% of their management overhead on projects where they would otherwise have duplication of efforts. With integrated time tracking and resource management, Caravan can easily find the daily status of team members without extraneous meetings.

In short, Manymoon makes it easier to plan, execute and track projects and lets Caravan focus on getting the job done with their clients. Internally, Caravan is also taking advantage of Manymoon as a lightweight customer relationship system (CRS) where they track both client channels as projects and manage internal initiatives all in one place. Caravan Interactive is looking forward to taking on 2011 with the right tools, thanks to Manymoon.

“We’ve gotten to the point where we use Manymoon for a number of internal and operational projects… in a way it’s serving as both a client project management tool and a business process system for us… Manymoon’s scaleable model is great for a business like ours where we need a top-shelf tool but don’t want to pay for bloated enterprise applications… It’s an agile tool for our agile business.”

– Jean-Etienne LaVallee, Senior Developer/Information Architect, Caravan Interactive

How can we help you? Learn more at manymoon.com

Collaborative Project Consulting Leads the Green Revolution, With the Help of Manymoon and Google Apps

We here at Manymoon are extremely proud to be helping an amazing  company lead its industry into the 21st century.  Let’s take a look.

The Customer

Collaborative Project Consulting, located in Los Angeles, California, facilitates the design and construction of environmentally advanced LEED-certified buildings. The buildings Collaborative works on routinely outperform their counterparts by 30% and more for both energy efficiency and reduced water consumption.

Everything Collaborative Project Consulting does hinges on open, transparent, and integrated communications. The project teams Collaborative works with include building owners, architects, design engineers, contractors and builders, and commissioning agents.

Examples of green LEED-certified building projects led by Collaborative Project Consulting.
(Photo credit RMA Photography)

The Vendor

Manymoon is a leading social productivity tool. Today, businesses are working and collaborating in fundamentally new ways, and Manymoon is enabling them to do so, leaving behind methods that are both inadequate (emails and spreadsheets) and outdated (static project management systems). Collaborative is using Manymoon, with Google Apps, to help lead the green revolution.

The Challenge

In recent years there has been a paradigm shift in the design process as building owners demand dramatic reductions in environmental impact. To achieve these goals, design teams must innovate and collaborate in new ways. The American Institute of Architects and the US Green Building Council have set a new standard called the “Integrative Design Process” where all parties share information, risk, and ultimately the reward.

Collaborative recognized the need for an effective information management tool a few years ago to facilitate this new paradigm.  According to Tim Kohut, AIA, LEED AP Homes and BD+C, Senior Strategist at Collaborative, “The tools we used to work with, like Basecamp, are very static tools and don’t do the job. We need tools that are as fluid and collaborative as our business.

The Solution

James Weiner, AIA, USGBC Charter LEED Faculty, and Principal Consultant at Collaborative, sums it up nicely. “Team members in an Integrative Design Process know fewer boundaries in a process that is fluid and highly innovative, but not many tools have been developed to assist in the critical exchange of ideas, documents, milestones, and tasks. This is a gap we’ve filled with Manymoon, closely integrated with Google Docs.”

Tim states “From our perspective, one of the real strengths of Manymoon is its close integration with Google Apps and Google Docs. Now, documents are alive, fluid, and easily accessible right where you want them – inside the task you’re working on. This is what an integrated process looks like!”

Manymoon allows tasks to be grouped into milestones with drag-and-drop simplicity.
Both milestone and task due dates can appear on a linked and shared Google Calendar.

The Results

Manymoon and Google Apps saves Collaborative up to 20% in terms of hours and effort (emails, conversations, etc.) For example, Tim estimates Manymoon saves him having to send 10-15 emails each day. Multiply that across the organization and it adds up to thousands of dollars in saved productivity.

And the results of using Manymoon are not limited to efficiency gains, but also include greater success in project outcomes, i.e. higher levels of LEED certification (Gold and Platinum).

Tim Kohut concludes enthusiastically “Integrative Design demands an integrated communication tool that will allow us to innovate and evolve at the same pace as our projects. Manymoon and Google Apps enable us to chart a course forward. Onward with Manymoon!”

To see a longer case study, with more information on how Collaborative Project Consulting uses Manymoon and Google Apps, click here.

Web Design Studio Omazing Creations uses Manymoon to Become more Productive, Efficient and Creative

We’re very proud of this latest Manymoon case study.

We’re helping web design studio Omazing Creations become more productive, efficient and creative by allowing them to organize their work and keep customers, management and developers on the same page.  We here at Manymoon live to help our customers succeed.

Manymoon isn’t just about efficiency, or saving time and money. We’re also about the intangible benefits that are realized when you remove obstacles and clutter from your working life. These benefits include the time and space to be more creative, thoughtful, innovative and expressive. Manymoon is about fulfilling the potential of your chosen occupation.

How can we help you? You can learn more about us at www.manymoon.com, or at our Support Universe.

PhasedReduction & Manymoon Featured by Google

We’re always thrilled to hear stories from our customers about how Manymoon helps their business.  It’s even better when they’re featured in a video from Google!  PhasedReduction builds software for hospitals that delivers healthcare quality metrics. They did a great job of talking about why they love the Google Apps Marketplace and how apps like Manymoon helped optimize their team’s workflow.

Learn How Schools & Students Get Organized Using Manymoon

Exciting news! Manymoon and one of our customers, Le Moyne College, were featured in the Official Google Enterprise Blog!

The blog post focused on how schools and students use Google Apps with other tools from the Google Apps Marketplace.  Google Apps and Manymoon are a powerful combination that enhance the learning experience.

Professor Jim Dessauer at Le Moyne College described how he uses Manymoon and Google Apps to organize a major initiative on juvenile justice. Manymoon allows him to coordinate classes and assignments between faculty, college students and local high school students involved in the project. Prof. Dessauer says Manymoon “saves lots of time for me and my students.”

Read more here…

How do you Manymoon? DataJoe Increases Revenue by 23%

One of the areas Manymoon shines is helping distributed groups of people work together.  DataJoe is a great example: they’ve used Manymoon at their headquarters and with remote employees to make sure projects come in on time.  This allows a company of DataJoe’s size to serve large clients who have national scale.

Read more about how DataJoe increased project capacity and revenue by using Manymoon.

How do you Manymoon? Entertaining As Always! Plans Amazing Weddings

“How Do You Manymoon?” is where we highlight members using Manymoon in innovative, fun or creative ways.  Are you using Manymoon in innovative ways?  Tell us how you Manymoon and we’ll highlight your story!

Entertaining As Always! Event Planning & Management

How do you Manymoon?

We use Manymoon to manage tasks, documents and general communications for our event planning firm, Entertaining As Always.  Entertaining As Always is a full-service event planning and management company, hosting everything from parties and weddings to corporate events.  We’ve found Manymoon especially helpful when working with couples in wedding planning.  Our brides can see what we are working on and they too can either be a part of completing a task or actually set one up for us.

We just completed an event this past weekend and used Manymoon to plan and manage the entire event.  It was seamless, fabulous and our clients loved how technological our planning services are compared to traditional event planners.

How has Manymoon helped you overcome specific challenges?

Many times you have to send multiple copies and revisions of documents.  This can lead to an issue when there are various versions and you nor the client know which was last used.  With the integration of Google Docs we can use one copy only, share it through Manymoon and accomplish the task and get the necessary results.

What are some of the results or business improvements you’ve seen since using Manymoon?

I can stay connected with my contracted staff, vendors and clients anywhere and at anytime.  We can see what is going on and stay on top of important documents, tasks or anything without losing step or having to travel to each other’s location. It has proven to be an awesome business tool and I am looking forward to utilizing it further.

Learn more about Gretchen and the Entertaining As Always team.

How do you Manymoon? Tim Kohut’s Team Loves the Google Integration–Sets Manymoon Apart

“How Do You Manymoon?” is where we highlight members using Manymoon in innovative, fun or creative ways.  Are you using Manymoon in innovative ways?  Tell us how you Manymoon and we’ll highlight your story!

How do you use Manymoon?

Tim Kohut, Senior Strategist, Collaborative Project Consulting

Collaborative Project Consulting provides sustainability, energy efficiency, and LEED (US Green Building Council) consulting services to clients interested in building and working in high performance, light filled, and healthy environments.  Our team is spread between Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Berkeley, Dallas, and Tokyo.  We were loyal Basecamp users, but decided we needed a project management tool that was closely integrated with Google Apps. We were tired of having task lists and milestones on Basecamp Calendars that were not linked to our Google Calendars.  Manymoon solved this problem for us.  Heavy users of Manymoon can see tasks, milestones, and documents in a single location.  Those who are not so reliant on Manymoon will see team tasks and milestones on their Google Calendars.  This helps us all communicate better.

Our team uses Manymooon “Tasks” within projects to delegate and prioritize work, identify upcoming deadlines, and communicate progress.  We also like being able to share tasks (something we couldn’t do in Basecamp) and the ability to link our tasks or messages to Google Docs (great integration with Google Apps).  Manymoon improves our collaboration skills – and Collaborative is our name.

How has Manymoon helped you overcome specific challenges?
Before choosing Manymoon, we struggled to find an application that would pull our calendars, task lists, and documents into one location.  Having email tie into this was also a desire.  Basecamp gave us a centralized location, but was not integrated with our email, our document storage, or our calendars.  Manymoon provided us with a bridge to Google Apps, and allowed us to link all of our communications.  It also allows us a path to gradually bring our team fully on board.  For those who are slow to fully embrace Manymoon, they can still use Google Docs and Calendar to track project progress.  Those fully on board see this on a daily basis within Manymoon’s home page.

What are some of the results or business improvements you’ve seen since using Manymoon?
Since we started using Manymoon, we’ve seen many improvements.  We love the “Manymoon Daily Planner” that shows up as an email every morning and provides a nice summary of the tasks due that day.  This is a great way to track progress, milestones, and deadlines.  We’re looking forward to more enhancements from the Manymoon team.  Keep them coming!