Thursday, June 23, 2011

Manymoon and Caravan Interactive


Learn how Caravan Interative, a mobile and web development company, uses Manymoon to reduce their project management overhead 15%


Customer
Caravan Interative was founded in 2009 by a group of like-minded entrepreneurs and industry-tested professionals and has rapidly grown into a multimedia, web, and mobile application development powerhouse. Caravan’s mission is to help their clients design and implement advanced applications using the latest web and mobile frameworks.

Vendor
Manymoon is the #1 social productivity application in the Google Apps Marketplace and is trusted by over 50,000 businesses. Manymoon makes it simple to share tasks, documents, events, and links with coworkers, customers, and partners. By seamlessly integrating with Google Apps, Manymoon helps organize and track projects so that anyone can efficiently collaborate and reduce email clutter. Manymoon is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and is proud to help thousands of businesses simplify their work life.

Challenge
Given Caravan’s ever-changing client base, project profiles, and development teams, Caravan traditionally developed unique project management plans on a per-project basis. That worked in the short term but quickly became exhaustive and mired in redundancy.

Solution
The two biggest factors for deciding to use Manymoon were its integration with Google Apps and its flexibility. With Manymoon, Caravan extended their existing cloud-based infrastructure (Google Apps, DropBox, and Salesforce.com) with a project management framework that’s flexible enough for small projects all the way up to large, multi-timezone projects in a consistent process model.
“The way we were organized [before using Manymoon] was like juggling chainsaws. Manymoon’s app just made it more efficient for us… it’s really the management app we needed in a cloud-based business environment.”
– Frank McDermott, Principle Owner/Senior Strategist, Caravan Interactive

Results
Manymoon lets Caravan choose a light-weight approach for simple projects and an encompassing, multi-phased approach for more complex projects without having to use different software. Caravan reported that being able to tie into their calendar, email and document management systems easily saves them 10-15% of their management overhead on projects where they would otherwise have duplication of efforts. With integrated time tracking and resource management, Caravan can easily find the daily status of team members without extraneous meetings.

In short, Manymoon makes it easier to plan, execute and track projects and lets Caravan focus on getting the job done with their clients.

“[Manymoon]’s pretty slick… When I have to layout a whole project or just a sprint for a development team, Manymoon makes it so much easier to plan, delegate and track work… It’s infinitely better than the 4 browser tabs for CRM, bug-tracking, docs, and timesheets that I used to need.”
– Adam Shackelford, Principle Owner/CTO, Caravan Interactive

For more information, watch this video from Manymoon or check out Manymoon from the Google Apps Marketplace