Fred & Augustus

Executive Summary

The business is a multi-faceted talent and events agency, that helps create experiences people care about. With three major components to the business - bookings, management, and events - there was a need to define, organize and streamline communications systems and processes so as to allow the team to more efficiently operate.

There were three main goals of the exercise. 1. To find a solution that would streamline how the business shared news about tours, events, and artist activities. 2. To clearly define employee roles, and empower staff members to work autonomously, including having access to resources and decision-making capabilities, and 3. To create an operational environment that supported stronger client communication, and operational efficiency.

Challenges

The business did not have a project management system software in place, communication was via text, messenger, and WhatsApp, and while GSuite was used to send emails, Google Docs was not being taken advantage of as a way to store and share company information centrally.

Once we knew what was not in place, we set about making sense of what was in order. For example, the company had a number of templates and pre-saved email copy, but there were also many templates and worksheets that were required. 

Solution

We began by creating workflows for the major functions of each area of the business. This allowed us to better understand the tasks and responsibilities that may fall under each job description, and to gain a clearer understanding of what each role entailed. We also asked the staff members to submit a list of their daily, weekly, monthly, and ongoing responsibilities. This was then cross-checked against the workflows to gain an understanding of what may be missing. 

From here, we then identified a) what templates were needed at each step of the workflow and b) which ones were in place, vs what needed to be created from scratch. Alongside the creation of these templates and workflows, it was agreed to switch to using Google Drive more proactively for file storage and sharing.

In tandem with this exercise, we explored and then settled on a PMS tool (ClickUp), and began having the team use the tool for task management, while also slowly ramping up communicating internally via the tool in regards to project queries and status updates. We also began outlining formal staff job descriptions, including any task amendments we had identified earlier.

As company document templates were created and agreed upon, we began identifying the types of project boards that would be needed in the PMS for each area of the business. These would also need to be saved as templates so the staff could easily adopt their use and recreation going forward. All of this information (Templates/ ClickUp Boards) was then documented and added as a ‘Company Resources’ link in ClickUp so that the team could easily access and refer to the information they needed. For example this included the Social Media and Email Schedule Template which could be implemented for the business, and for artists too.

Lastly, with communication occurring across so many different platforms (text, messenger, Whatsapp), it was determined that the team would move to Slack, and implement this platform as the primary, and preferred way of internal communication (alongside the comment feature within ClickUp).