Bonsai Crea is a marketing and advertising agency based in Medellin, Colombia that is dedicated to creating branding and marketing strategies for businesses. Their work includes everything from traditional advertising projects to complete digital marketing strategies. It’s a small company, just 14 people, but their size doesn’t define the clients they take on – they’ve worked with large clients at a national level!
We sat down with Alejandro Florez, the art and general director of Bonsai, who implemented Workep as the company’s go-to project management tool over 2 years ago, to talk about how our project management software has contributed to the agency’s productivity.
How many people use Workep within the company?
If I’m not mistaken, 12 at the moment.
How many departments of the company use Workep and which ones are they?
We have two departments in Bonsai, the creative and the administrative, and we use Workep in both areas. The creative department is much bigger, as it’s where we produce all of the projects, and the administrative department is where we handle billing and accounting for the projects.
Are there projects shared between departments?
Yes, because when projects end the creative phase, they enter into the billing phase. That’s where the projects have some overlap between the creative and administrative departments.
What do you use Workep for?
Workep is with us from the very beginning of every project to the very end. Whenever we begin a project, we meet with the client to receive all of the information for their request. We then create a project for that client in Workep and put all of the info into a task, called campaign creation or campaign launch, and from there we begin to create other tasks and subtasks and assign them to the team.
We use all of the internal communication in Workep, such as chats, comments, and everything else. Once the necessary people get involved, we start using tags to monitor what phase a project is in. We pass on completed work to clients, receive any requests for adjustments, and then reassign tasks to the team to implement the clients’ requests. When the final product is complete, we close the project, and pass it on to the billing area to complete that phase.
Why did you choose Workep as your project management solution?
We had started using G Suite, and it helped us a lot with our productivity by keeping all of our work in Google’s Cloud so that the whole team could access it and collaborate more easily. I thought to myself that Google must have some kind of project management tool, but I couldn’t find one. It made me curious, so I started looking for a long time for project management software that worked with Google, searching on Google with a lot of different keywords, and eventually I found Workep.
When I found out that one of the big benefits of Workep is that it integrates all of the tools from G Suite, it called my attention. It really interested me that it was made for G Suite and designed to function just like a part of G Suite. Then, I found out that the creators are from Medellin, and since I’m from Medellin, it made me curious to try a tool that was made close to home and not in some far-away place.
I did the free trial, and at some moment I had a doubt or question about how to do something. I contacted support and to my surprise it was Eduardo, one of the founders of Workep, who helped me resolve my problem. It really impressed me that one of the founders was right there behind the support chat and walking me through step-by-step to answer my question. I bought the license for Workep after that.
The great support has continued over the past 2 years. Every time we have contacted someone from Workep to help us with an issue, it has been a friendly interaction with someone close, and we have built a trusting relationship with the team at Workep. Workep has always responded promptly and honestly if there has ever been a crash or an issue with the project management platform and we always receive excellent attention.
What project management tools did you use before Workep?
I was using Wunderlist, which is just a task list. It’s really simple and easy to use, but I wasn’t sure it was the ideal tool. I wanted more than just a list of tasks. Asana called my attention at the time, because I saw that you could integrate it somewhat with Gmail to receive notifications and such, and I almost went with that until I found Workep. I was also looking at Trello and some other project management software I don’t remember the name of, but in the end Workep won me over because of the full integration with G Suite.
How much has your productivity increased thanks to Workep?
200 percent! Let’s just say that Workep is a tool that is totally necessary at Bonsai. It allows us to centralize all the info about every project and share it with the whole team. Without Workep, we would have to go back to using emails, phone calls, and things that don’t fit well with a philosophy of collaborative work.
Without Workep, it would be difficult to access all of the relevant info about a past project. We would have to look through chains of emails to find information about past projects, and maybe the people who worked on them aren’t even at the company anymore. With Workep we can just search for completed projects, even if they were finished years ago, and see exactly what happened on each one and have the whole history in one place. We don’t lose any information about past projects, even if collaborators who worked on them are gone.
What project management methodology do you use?
We tried out all of the project management methodologies in Workep, and we found that the list view works best for us. For our style of work, we are accustomed to using lists, so we stick with the list view.
How many projects and tasks do you use Workep for?
Right now we have 20 projects, each of which represents a different client. Within those projects, we create up to 15 tasks every week. I would say that we create 200-250 tasks in Workep each week for the whole organization.
Can you tell us how a specific project has benefited from Workep?
To be honest, most projects go the same in Workep, and we have the same results, habits, and processes. All of our projects benefit from having the information centralized in one place and shared with everyone. Another benefit is that we can create multiple teams so we can assign only the relevant projects and tasks to those teams. That way, I only get the information that is important to me, and I don’t have to see what is going on with projects that I am not working on.
Do you have any good stories about using Workep?
I think the best story I have is about how surprised I was when I realized the person helping me through support was one of the founders. Instead of just telling me what to do, he even had me share my screen with him, and walked me through my problem step-by-step to solve it. I thought, “this is support!”
“Workep has facilitated the monitoring of marketing projects by centralizing all of the information in one place, which, with the G Suite integration, has made us into a more efficient team.” – Alejandro Florez, Bonsai Crea
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