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Why We Built Oversight: Our Solution to Remote Work Management

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Published:May 11, 2022
Last Modified:July 20, 2022

 

 

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!

 

So why did we build another management solution?

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

A solution to unify and analyze disparate team and project data

There are many project management solutions on the market, but when interviewing agency teams two things became clear:

  1. Every team used has its own special mix of technology products in order to successfully manage their projects
  2. These projects were all held together, and ultimately successful or not, based on one individual keeping crazy spreadsheets and manually checking in with every person on her team regularly

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.

Problems managing people and projects when sprinting at 100mph

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:

  • Track various types of complicated budgets from monthly to sprint-based to project-based and more
  • Plan resources based on project sprints, but visualize planning weekly or monthly
  • Track actual time spent vs time planned no matter what timer you use
  • Forecast performance and budgets
  • Monitor team productivity, not screens
  • Receive proactive alerts the minute anything tracks wrong
  • Receive in-depth reports without having to log into any platforms
  • Unify and report on data across multiple platforms

Disconnected systems make an agency go round

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:

  • CRM: HubSpot, Capsule, Pipedrive
  • PMS: Jira, Asana, Trello, Teamwork
  • Time: Harvest, Everhour, Toggl, Teamwork Timer
  • Dev: Github, Bitbucket
  • Design: Figma
  • Chat: Slack, Teams
  • Calendar: Google Calendar, Outlook

Catch issues before they occur with Forecasting and Alerts

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:

  • When resources haven’t logged hours, haven’t pushed code to the origin, or have decreased productivity
  • When projects are forecasted to go over budget, when team members log hours to projects they are not scheduled for, or when tickets go stale for too long
  • When leads are not followed up with or when clients are not responded to in a timely manner

Plan and track complex projects on different timelines

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.

Join our beta! 

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.

Learn More >

Join the Beta >

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