Nu Works Interactive: Going Agile with Kanbanchi
Nuworks Interactive shared their approach to lead creative teams towards success by adopting agile and told us how Kanbanchi helped make that happen.
The Philippines’ biggest independent full-service digital agency
NuWorks Interactive is a full cycle creative interactive solutions agency developing exciting and creative technology for the brands. It is the Philippines’ biggest independent full-service digital firm – not just an award-winning agency, but, an innovative business solutions partner. Only eight years old, they have achieved many impressive milestones and worked with some of the biggest brands in the country such as Nestle Ice Cream Philippines, Acer Philippines, Canon Philippines, Monde Nissin Corp, Goldilocks Corporation, Bounty Fresh, and many more. The agency’s offerings are vast – from the marketing and business strategy, media planning, and strategy, digital execution on both creative works and software engineering to social community management and public relations.
Michael Ng’s role is the Research and Development Director, which is all about innovating the agency’s process and product offerings to find better ways to address their clients’ needs. His department has extensive experience in offering Augmented Reality applications, Kinect-based Applications, Cross-platform games and mobile applications, web applications, database management, and recently, Virtual Reality solutions.
Path to Agility & Growth
When the company size reached fifty people, Michael and his colleagues started looking for tools that could help them manage ever-increasing workload. After their first bet, a physical board, time after time got obsolete, the team switched to online tools. They tried Basecamp and Trello, but quickly understood that those were not a fit for them at that moment.
Moreover, Michaels’ department, R&D, works with a lot of uncertainty and ever-changing requirements. This led the team to abandon the waterfall process and headed towards agility, so they needed tools that were fast, and agile.
Basecamp was really text heavy and there was a learning curve for newcomers. Also, it was too much of a process for us to monitor tasks. With Trello I quickly understood that I didn’t want to keep on using other passwords because I knew that people would forget or start ignoring if I introduced a separate thing that had its own login.
Michael Ng, Research and Development Director at Nuworks Interactive
Getting the team on board
When Michael discovered Kanbanchi, he realised that it was it right away. He showed it to his partners and they liked it. First, Kanbanchi was used exclusively for the tech team but people from other departments started looking at them and ask questions. More and more people across the company got interested in kanban boards and since Kanbanchi was already deployed in every employee’s Google Drive other departments were able to quickly jump in.
I was looking for something deeply integrated to Google Docs and something simple that everyone in the team could get into with little to almost no learning curve. Kanbanchi and its integration with Google apps for work made it easy for the team to adopt. We did not have to maintain new accounts and manage different licenses. It is very simple to use and lightweight. This also inspired the team to be self-disciplined in monitoring the progress and correctness of the tasks assigned to them. Kanbanchi also replaced our IT ticketing and traffic monitoring system for same reasons.
Michael Ng, Research and Development Director at Nuworks Interactive
The tool you use matters!
Today around 70 people are using Kanbanchi at Nuworks – R&D, IT and Advertising Departments. They were able to achieve agility with the aid of Kanbanchi as the agile process is still relatively new to the Philippines. As a scale-up competing in the digital advertising space, agility is a clear advantage because they can move things quicker like studying and creating new services to address an opportunity in the rapidly changing industry of digital advertising.
It’s difficult to quantify the impact Kanbanchi made. I guess it’s safe to say that it made task management at least some parts of it at least twice faster than going through multiple pages in project management tools. Because it’s all there, it’s all laid out, everything’s right there in front of you.
Michael Ng, Research and Development Director at Nuworks Interactive
You never know what will work for your team until finding out by trial and error, so follow the lead of Nuworks and give Kanbanchi a try today!