About
RogueMark Studios is a Berkeley, California-based and woman-owned creative agency. They create animations, illustrated videos, and visual notes for companies of all shapes and sizes. To learn more about them, check out this video.
Results with Toggl Track
- Enabled team to reconfigure budgets, contracts and schedules to more accurately match a realistic timeline
- Improved flexibility and communication within the team and when facing clients
- Increased data reporting by 85% and boosted resource allocation to 45%
“Toggl Track has given us actual data about our labor; we're able to see how much time each step of our creative process takes. As women in an industry that remains male-dominated, it's really important to us that our work is rewarded appropriately, and that we're not doing work for free.”
— Bethany Kaylor, Writer at RogueMark Studios
Challenges
“Life before Toggl Track was a hot mess,” said Bethany Kaylor, a writer at RogueMark Studios. Her team had experimented with project management and time tracking tools, but they could never achieve full team buy-in. The user interfaces just weren’t appealing, or the learning curves were too steep to be viable.
When the RogueMark team started to restructure their budgets, it became clear that they had a serious time tracking problem. Despite working in the whimsical and creative world of animation, they still needed a data-driven, accurate tool for forecasting how long each part of their process was taking, from concept to storyboarding to style-development to editing.
Approximations weren’t cutting it, because they often underestimated actual required labor. It was frustrating for everyone to feel like they never had enough time or budget to finish a project.
Solution
Toggl Track has given us actual data about our labor; we're able to see how much time each step of our creative process takes,” Kaylor said. “It has allowed us to reconfigure our budgets, contracts, and schedules to more accurately match a realistic timeline.
Perhaps most importantly, it has established a more dedicated culture of time tracking within our team. According to Kaylor, people are actually excited to log their hours!
With Toggl Track, the RogueMark team can structure their daily activities by comparing how much time they have left for a certain part of their process. For example, if 50 hours have been allocated for storyboarding, and they've already used 35, they can adapt those last 15 hours to stay on budget and on schedule. Their flexibility and communication (both within the team and to their clients) has greatly improved.
Track project time like RogueMark Studios
Sign up for freeKaylor told us, “Creative work is hard to put a finger on. Unless you're in the industry, you probably don't realize how much time, collaboration, and revision goes into every finished product. With stop-motion animation, a video that's 10 seconds can take weeks to produce.”
Having accurate forecasts of labor helps RogueMark create budgets that compensate them fairly and gives them the time to create a beautiful product for their client. As women in an industry that remains male-dominated, it's really important to them that their work is rewarded appropriately, and that they're not doing work for free, according to Kaylor.
The bottom line: Implementing Toggl Track has increased RogueMark’s data reporting by 85%, and boosted their resource allocation to 45%.
