How StudioNorth keeps their project management engine in sync

At DoneDone, we’ve always committed our product to focusing on one thing and doing that one thing very well---bringing teams together to resolve issues efficiently. We don’t purport to be an “everything but the kitchen sink” solution. In fact, for us, DoneDone sits alongside a host of other focused pieces of software, including Basecamp and Harvest, as part of a suite of tools we use to do great work.

Our friends at StudioNorth, a full-service marketing agency in the greater Chicago area, share the same thoughts. The StudioNorth team uses DoneDone alongside Trello and Resource Guru to catalog all of their various projects.

Eric Chellstorp, a senior digital project manager, shared some insight into how StudioNorth makes DoneDone an integral part of their suite of internal development tools.“

I reviewed literally dozens of cloud software solutions that claim to do all of these tasks in one place,” Eric said. “But, not one of them can exceed the individual features, power and ease-of-use that these three individual apps offer.”

Eric uses ResourceGuru to set schedules for his entire development team and Trello to manage larger project milestones. DoneDone handles all of the bugs logged on their clients' software, applications and websites.

Managing these three products manually would be taxing---particularly if discussions in one tool need to be referenced in another. So, Eric and his team use Zapier as the behind-the-scenes glue to link them all together. Here's how it works:

• When a new project is ready to kick off, Eric creates a new project in Resource Guru, following a pre-defined template for scheduling his development team.
• ResourceGuru, in turn, sends a webhook request into Zapier, which then creates projects in both Trello and DoneDone (using the DoneDone API). “I've linked the three apps together so that anytime a change is made to one (scope, title comments, and so forth), the change is passed on to the other two,” Eric explains. “All of them stay in sync.”
• The development team uses Trello to get a better understanding of scope while the QA team gets to work in DoneDone to log specific issues as the project progresses. The QA team stores test reports for SEO and accessibility for each project in DoneDone as well.
• Developers then work within DoneDone to update issue statuses and add comments.

For Eric and his team, using DoneDone's API along with a few other great services has made a huge impact on their internal workflow. To date, StudioNorth has managed over 400 projects with this workflow.

“Neither my devs or QA person needs to ever worry about creating a job, looking for information about the job, or archiving completed jobs. The info is always at their fingertips, and the rest is kept in sync by me using just one trigger.”

Many thanks to Eric and the team at StudioNorth for sharing this insight with us!