How SocialChain saves 4 hours per week and eliminates double-handling with ĸ
SocialChain 🤝 ĸ: a summary
The problem: lack of visibility into team members’ actual capacity frequently led to double-handing work, resulting in wasted hours
The solution: ĸ was implemented as a shared, centralized database of 200+ SocialChain team members’ availability and capacity
The result: double-handling was eliminated, and the right team members were consistently assigned to the right projects, ultimately saving the team four hours per week
ĸ’s essentially an additional teammate. We rely heavily on ĸ to help keep things on track in an easily digestible and understandable way.
The company
SocialChain is a global strategic social media agency that creates impactful content for major brands like BBC, Panasonic, and Coca-Cola. Founded in 2014, the agency has grown into a global social media powerhouse with over 700 team members in Manchester, London, New York, Munich, and Berlin.
Jamie Bryan was SocialChain’s Head of Design from 2015 to 2021, where he helped build out the creative team of designers, illustrators, and photographers. Bryan was also responsible for keeping these team members on track and in sync—an endeavor he quickly learned was easier said than done.
The problem: duplicated work and no visibility into team capacity
SocialChain projects typically involve input from multiple teams—publishing, influencer, video, and graphic design—often coordinated by a single account manager or department head. With many teams juggling multiple tasks at once, wires inevitably got crossed.
Bryan noticed the team often ended up double-handling tasks because of a lack of visibility into one another’s schedules. The tipping point came when he and another team member unknowingly duplicated work on the same project.
“One morning, we found ourselves both working on the same project without realizing another team member was already on it. That’s when we knew we needed an organized resource management solution to manage our schedules and balance workloads.”
The solution: a resource management system as the team’s source of truth
As the team got busier and the business grew, they started looking for a tool to streamline their resource allocation and scheduling. “We needed something that could manage our workflows and, more importantly, our expectations of each other,” said Bryan.
So, in 2017, the team turned to ĸ to help them plan capacity across multiple projects—while keeping everything visible to the entire team.
ĸ’s visual Schedule gives SocialChain an overview of their team’s time
Once SocialChain moved all 200+ team members into ĸ, everything changed.
The color-coded Schedule page instantly gave the entire team real-time coworker status at a glance, with current and upcoming projects laid out weeks and even months in advance for everyone to see.
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Being able to visualize our workload in a timeline, in all of ĸ’s color-coded glory, gave us much-needed structure during a period of intense growth. It helped us set boundaries for the work we continued to take on, to identify where we needed to hire resources, and also gave us a new perspective on how we valued our time.
The result: hours saved, overallocation squashed
ĸ saved time and made it easier to allocate the right people to projects while ensuring team members had enough time to complete their work.
📈 The team saves 4 hours per week on average
Account managers can now plan campaigns more effectively by considering both current and future workloads across project teams.
The risk of double-handling has virtually disappeared, thanks to complete visibility into each team member’s availability and allocations.
And according to Bryan, within just a few weeks of using ĸ, they eliminated the need for an email-based design booking system, and the resource booking process improved exponentially.
🚨 Potential overallocation is spotted early
“ĸ helped us set boundaries for the work we continued to take on and identify where we needed to hire resources,” said Bryan. “We’re able to visualize periods of time where we are at full capacity.”
Sorting people in ĸ from most to least unscheduled (or vice versa) has helped SocialChain home in on team members who are running low on work—or need more to fill their time.
Seeing their upcoming project pipeline and resource capacity in one place also lets leadership plan ahead to hire for roles when a specific skill is in short supply.
🔥 Every project gets a dream team
With ĸ, SocialChain can filter team members by role, location, time off status, and even skill-specific tags to put together the perfect (and available) team for every project.
“Using ĸ was the perfect way of integrating structure into our team at the time,” said Bryan. “It enabled us to allocate projects and work with specific people.”
This way, all team members can work to their strengths and keep doing their best work for the agency’s growing list of happy clients.
If it’s not in ĸ, it’s not getting done
Years later, team members (including Bryan) have come and gone, and the business has grown significantly—but ĸ is still integral to SocialChain’s operations, from managing client bookings to allocating resources and planning capacity.
Creating unique, people-driven campaigns that inspire their clients’ audiences is something they’ve been successfully doing for more than a decade. And this fine-tuned process wouldn’t be nearly as streamlined without ĸ.
Every project and scheduled resource is managed through ĸ. To put it simply, if it’s not in ĸ, it’s not getting done!
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