Studio Workload Management Analysis

Summary: The Studio department was suffering from high-turnover rates, coupled with increased demand for our services from other teams, leading to an overall stressful environment in the team. This project included an analysis of all campaign and internal task work over the last 12-month period, and lead to the development of improved workflow management processes and rules for Studio to roll out across markets.

Role: Owned

My Process:

1. Download 12 month data of every logged task/ticket in Jira (campaigns, internal projects)

2. Sorted data to uncover:

   • All-time open ticket average

   • Average ticket count per team member

   • Average ticket count open per week (across members)

3. From there, perform analysis on averages, and check on standard deviation

4. Based on findings, developed a weighting system comprising of:

   1. Weight for each possible task type (size of ticket, number of formats, etc)

   2. A “bean” number to represent that weight based on analysis

   3. A maximum number of bean count for each designer

   4. Develop requirements and rules to help manage workflow:

      1. Picking up new tickets based on chroniological order and not campaign budget—rewarding sellers who follow process versus large campaign budgets. Leading to improved effecincies across teams over time

      2. An ideal split for work-type, with 75% of bean count to be allocated to booked campaigns, and the remaining 25% to remain open for proactive mocks, or other projects, in order to promote better balance

   5. Create a secondary funnel for “sprouting” tickets that allows work to be assigned/queued but not actioned until work is freed

   6. Code this logic into a Jira dashboard to be referenced by Senior Designers as they assign work, and by the team as a whole on stand-ups

Results: Implementing this system improved overall stress levels and provided a framework for managing work across the team. 6 months after this was rolled out I conducted a review of our SLA’s and determined that even with these new guidelines, Studio was still delivering on their campaign SLA’s.