Matching Creative Efforts with Solid Operational Management

Nordkapp is a renowned a creative business advisory from Finland. Founded in 2007, they've worked with numerous well-known brands in the field of business renewal, design, and strategy. Their customers range from scale-up companies like Starship, Swappie, and Oura to established enterprises like Nokia.

For a creative agency to actually be creative, solid operational management is needed. Nordkapp turned to Operating to better make sense of their current client needs, consultants' availability, and capacity forecast. On top of that, Nordkapp is using Operating to make sure that their utilization and hours spent are in line with what's being sold to the customers. Operating connected to Harvest gives them full visibility over their planned capacity and actual hours spent, making it easier to run a profitable business – and helping consultants focus on providing value to customers.

The Command Centre

Before Operating, Nordkapp lacked one place to store all project allocation and time tracking data. Nordkapp had tried different tools, but none really fit their needs–Operating was able to solve many challenges at once. The people in charge of the resource allocation use Operating daily, while the leadership team uses it in their weekly meeting to get an understanding on how the business is going at a given moment. Nordkapp has named Operating their command centre highlighting its importance in the weekly rhythm of running their agency operation. Operating gives Nordkapp the visibility to:

• Sales Forecast: Tentative project allocations in Operating indicate how the team will be allocated in the coming weeks and months.
• Overworked Consultants: Operating makes it easy to identify overworked consultants. Nordkapp is able to make adjustments to workloads to ensure a balanced resource allocation.
• Availability of consultants: Determining consultant availability is a critical question for any agency. Operating gives clear visibility to this on an individual, team, or even skill level.
• Keeping utilization up: Nordkapp can not only see the coming allocations of their consultants. With the plug and play Harvest integration, they gain visibility into actual hours spent, making it easier to help consultants plan their work better and increase utilization.

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Cultural Shift

Operating has helped Nordkapp create a vocabulary and common practices to run their agency operations more efficiently. As the utilization numbers, capacity forecast, and people's availability are transparently viewable, it's easier to help everyone understand how the business is performing each month and what's to come. Nordkapp uses Operating in their all-hands meetings to communicate all this. By ensuring the whole team understands how they are utilized, everyone can make better decisions on their own use of time.

Summary

Nordkapp uses Operating to improve visibility into consultant availability, capacity forecasts, and utilization data. This allows them to match their creative efforts with solid operational management. Operating, linked with Harvest, offers a clear view of planned versus actual hours, crucial for maintaining profitability. This system has transformed Nordkapp’s approach to running their business, making information accessible and supporting a more informed, efficient team dynamic.

"Operating has given us a whole new visibility to our operational numbers. Discussing utilization with the leadership team, and communicating to numbers to everyone has become much easier."

ELISA LIPPONEN, DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS