How Dale Studios Scales Digital Design with Taskworld
BY JESSICA ZARTZLER
Nike, Ralph Lauren, Converse, UGG, Speedo, Maybelline, Casio, Jaguar, Ted Baker and the list goes on… Dale Studios’ resume is quite impressive. But namesake founder Dale might never have guessed during the agency’s humble beginnings, with some crazy ideas and a few printing machines, that the business would have soared to such heights.
Dale Studios is the brainchild of Leichester based artist Dale ‘Silver Scalpel’ Broughton. In past 30 years his team has added dozens of employees and supplied to 28 countries and despite its serious success, the Dale Studios team doesn’t take itself too seriously, as you can tell in their video.
And it’s this grounded approach with a good sense of humor that comes through in the creativity of their work, supplying bespoke print and unitry for point-of-sales across international industries with big and small brands. That, mixed with a direct professionalism, is why companies have chosen to work with them time and again.
But in 30 years of business, Dale Studios, as many others do, has not been without its challenges in keeping up with new technologies, running projects and scaling teams. Recently, it has added digital design and web development to its offering, including projects in e-commerce, advertising and branding design.
As work and projects expanded, so did the challenges of internal communications, assigning tasks, and keeping track of the burgeoning workloads. It was clear the new department, with a growing team and workload, needed a way to track everything and maintain accountability — and email and spreadsheets weren’t working.
Tom O’Callaghan, one of agency’s most creative designers shared his thoughts with us:
“The issues we wanted to prevent were largely communication based, whether it be two colleagues tackling the same task separately, or two colleagues assuming the other was completing a task, the key was to avoid wasted man hours or missed tasks. Equally, we wanted to be sure that each and every member of the team could see, at a glance, their daily tasks, project statuses and upcoming deadlines from anywhere and at any time.” — Tom
That’s when the Dale Studios team discovered Taskworld.
“Taskworld offered all of the features of competitors together in one system with a clean, uncluttered UI. This made it the perfect choice, offering us the functionality we required without undue complication and without compromise.” — Tom
Dale Studios says the project management tool gave them the central resource the team was looking for, and they were able to allocate tasks, discuss their progress and completion more efficiently on the individual and team level. Dale’s digital design team was able to streamline workflows in days rather than months, and the process from intake to completion on projects sped up exponentially.
“Taskworld allows our fledgling team to have autonomy over their individual workload and to maintain flexible work hours without creating bottlenecks or missed deadlines…it prevents duplication of work & ensures deadlines are never missed as it’s real-time synchronisation across users and devices keeps all of the team ‘clued up’ on what their colleagues are doing.” — Tom
In addition to keeping on top of current projects, Tom says he loves having the ability to get a bird’s eye view on the day and week, and to see potential problems before they arise.
“The overview screen is my work dashboard, showing me what I need to do and when, to ensure every work day is seamless and successful with no nasty surprises.” — Tom
And it is in that daily work and focus that Dale Studios has built on for three decades, that has allowed it to grow, nurture its employees and create opportunities. With its creativity, professionalism, sense of humor, and now, the right tools, the sky is the limit for what the team can create and share.
“I would absolutely recommend Taskworld. It has made managing my new team a pleasure instead of a potential headache, leaving me free to work on my team’s growth, not it’s administration.” — Tom
A special thank you to Tom O’Callaghan for sharing his story. To learn more about Dale Stuios, head to http://dalestudios.co.uk/
