Name: Onespacemedia
Based: Cambridge
Website: www.onespacemedia.com
Growing a creative agency at speed comes with all kinds of challenges. Many of these revolve around constant, clear communication and in-depth project management – so it was time to try a few different things to naturally unite a growing team of personalities during the course of their work.
First, we actually knocked the walls down. The bulk of our studio’s production space is now open-plan – and although there are various, well-documented schools of thought on this, it’s worked well to both remove barriers and inspire conversation around the trickiest problems.
With a growing need to carefully manage our scheduling, we also took on some new HR forecasting tools (Forecast, by Harvest) that allow us a level of diligence with our resource planning that we’d never had before. It helps us to tackle issues before they occur – so that we keep workloads manageable, deadlines realistic, and the production team sane.
We’ve also taken on Slack – an excellent communication tool that serves as a comms channel for all of our ongoing discussions. To get the most out of it, we turbo-charged it with hooks into all of our technical systems. We’re notified immediately to new builds or issues, which has given us an enormous amount of power over our technical environment and maintenance contracts.
We also kicked out the arcade machine. Turns out that when there’s so much work to do, those things just sit there gathering dust.
Thomas Rumbold is head of product at Onespacemedia
