Oversight, our internal management software turned SaaS, is starting its closed beta and transitioning into full open beta by June 2022! Oversight is a work management system built to tackle the constant challenges of running a high-performance hybrid agency. This software has undergone several iterations as an internal tool for Tragic before we transitioned it into a SaaS solution to help agencies everywhere to ditch their spreadsheets and embrace automated data insights!
After cycling through the best project management systems on the market, and several different project management leads, our problems remained unsolved. We realized that the issue was not with any particular system, but rather, that managing fast-paced projects with a hybrid or remote team increases the pains of tedious manual tracking. Instead of finding one platform to solve all of our problems, we realized we needed a platform to unify and extend the systems that we were already using successfully. This article will uncover how Oversight became the solution to our tragic ongoing pains of managing a remote team working on fast-paced software projects.
Want to jump to the good stuff? https://oversight.co
There are many project management solutions on the market, but when interviewing agency teams two things became clear:
This is the same pain we have felt at Tragic. No one system ever seems to be enough to manage everything from client requests to project planning to production to billing to resourcing and scheduling. And when you are managing multiple systems, the only way to keep it all together is with a lot of reports and manual spreadsheets.
Not an ideal solution when mismanagement could lead to tens of thousands of dollars of losses.
As a small software agency, our main pains distill down to properly tracking people and projects when running full-speed with limited overhead. With our clients we deal with big expectations, tight budgets, demanding user experiences, unknown platform issues, shifting priorities, and unforgiving deadlines.
Managing a hybrid team for the past 13 years has afforded us a lot of pain that other companies are just now starting to feel. When not properly motivated or managed, employees tend to slowly stop working as much as possible while still collecting a paycheck. It eventually becomes evident, but that can cost a growing business a lot of money. The existing solutions to combat this are overbearing and not employee-privacy friendly. We have been searching for a system that tracks productivity without tracking screens, and finally, we just built one ourselves.
With Oversight, we think we have found a great balance to help high-performance agencies ditch the spreadsheet and better manage hybrid and remote teams working on fast-paced projects. Here are a few of the core problems we solve with Oversight:
There are a lot of great systems out there to help you manage the various tasks, from sales to billing to project management, necessary to run a successful agency. And while some of those tools can be connected, there is rarely a way to unify and track your company or project data. So either you spend all of your time running reports and building spreadsheets or you run your company blind. Oversight combines the platforms you already use to run your agency and provides you with advanced tools to unify, report, and analyze your team and project data. Below are a few of the different software we will support with our beta:
Some of the major problems our CEO Tragic Rich experienced during moments of high growth, was that problems were always identified way too late, whether it was an unproductive team member, a project that had fallen behind, or a resourcing issue. Oversight leverages sophisticated machine learning models to forecast project budgets and performance. These forecasting models coupled with proactive alerts make the platform extremely powerful and help managers catch issues before, or right when, they occur. Alerts can be configured based on the factors that matter most to your business, below are a few examples of when alerts can be sent:
One of our bigger pains is that we cater our contracts to each engagement, and are often dealing with differing sprint and billing cycles. All clients care about their budgets and timelines, and tracking resources can get complex especially when things fall behind. With Oversight, simply input the available hours and sprint timelines and the system will optimize schedules and track resources progress against what is planned.
The system is flexible to tracking resources and budgets as granularly as needed on a project-by-project basis. Additionally, with automated reports, interactive dashboards, and instant notifications - you can be confident that your projects will stay on track.
We know the struggles of growing a successful agency, and we want to help take some of the pain (and manual tracking!) away.
While we had various versions of Oversight (originally Team Trackr) working internally, it was a big lift reimagining this as a scalable SaaS platform that can work for agencies that operate much differently than we do at Tragic.
We are looking for some select agencies to join the platform in our closed beta and provide some feedback on what is working, not working, and missing so that we can be sure we have the strongest solution possible when we open our doors to the world. Users selected for our closed beta will have a minimum 1-year free access to the platform, with the possibility of continued free access.