Pentagram
About
With a portfolio spanning over five decades, Pentagram has established itself as a design powerhouse across graphics, branding, strategy, and digital experiences. While they are primarily known for their expertise in graphic design and branding, they also work on product design projects, applying their design thinking methodology across various mediums and industries.
The Before
Despite their creative prowess, the Pentagram team was drowning in scattered project information across servers, spreadsheets, and various drives. Their organizational challenges included:
- Project information scattered across multiple servers and drives
- Inefficient processes for accessing and finding critical files
- Low adoption of their existing Notion workspace
- Lack of centralized project management and team coordination
- No clear documentation of processes or best practices
- Difficulty tracking new business ventures and team bandwidth
The Process
We kicked off with a comprehensive roadmap inspired by agile methodology. Working directly in Pentagram’s workspace, we implemented changes live during calls, ensuring every component felt intuitive for their team.
Our collaborative approach included:
- Auditing their existing Notion templates to identify improvement opportunities
- Creating customized dashboards that matched their specific workflow needs
- Developing creative solutions for tracking team bandwidth across projects
- Implementing live changes with immediate feedback loops
- Providing comprehensive training to ensure team-wide adoption
Outcome & Impact
Pentagram received an organizational system that matched the caliber of their creative work — sophisticated, intuitive, and built to evolve with their legendary design practice. The transformation has revolutionized how their team collaborates and manages projects.
Centralized Information Hub
We created a comprehensive projects dashboard with high-level overviews and granular project details, including color-coded team bandwidth tracking. This centralized hub ensures that the right information is accessible to the right team members at the right time, significantly reducing search time and confusion.
Enhanced Team Collaboration
Individual team dashboards are now customizable to each member's preferences and workflow needs, while the general dashboard features team birthdays, announcements, and organizational overview. Team capacity visualization through color-coding (red, yellow, green) provides instant insight into availability and workload.
Streamlined Business Development
The new business dashboard tracks prospects from pitch to win, with sensitive financial data visible only to the sales team. This has created a seamless transition from prospect to client and improved visibility into the business development pipeline.
Standardized Processes
Clearer templates and standardized processes now exist across all project types, with comprehensive documentation that makes onboarding new team members significantly faster. The directory page efficiently manages client, vendor, and collaborator information in one searchable location.
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