The gist

HUSH, an experience design studio that builds large-scale experiences in physical spaces, implemented Parallax for more clarity into project health and to optimize resource planning and allocation.

The challenge

HUSH’s client engagements are often long-term and complex. Projects can be years long, rely on close partnerships with construction teams, and require many resources, including internal employees and freelance contractors.

This project complexity makes resource planning, budgeting, and forecasting challenging. In an attempt to solve these challenges, HUSH built multiple homegrown spreadsheets.

“Our spreadsheets were doing a lot of work for us, but none of them spoke to each other. In addition to the individual spreadsheets we used for resource planning, budgets, actuals, and cost to finish, finance created an even bigger dashboard to understand the business’s health. But nothing was smart; nothing was talking to each other,” said Kristen DiCamillo, managing partner at HUSH.

“I was also over-allocating some of our resources. With spreadsheets, I couldn’t feel the weight of the burden I was putting on certain people,” added DiCamillo.

The solution

HUSH implemented Parallax for more visibility into what was happening across the business, including within production teams, in the sales pipeline, and on specific projects. This visibility provided clarity that encouraged better communication across the studio and led to more effective project planning, scoping, budgeting, and forecasting.

The studio was happy to find a solution that integrated with its CRM, Pipedrive. This integration has been a “game changer” for HUSH’s operational efforts, helping the studio to proactively allocate resources to projects in the pipeline to better forecast utilization and resource needs.

HUSH now uses Parallax to:

• Help the sales team quickly and easily price projects in the pipeline using standard service offerings
• Forecast utilization by allocating resources to projects in the sales pipeline, ensuring a healthy utilization for individual resources and proactively identifying when the studio needs to recruit contractors to fill open roles
• Break out long-term projects into phased service offerings, making it easier to adjust in-progress projects and enabling more proactive client communication about budget and timing changes
• Understand which departments have the capacity available to support internal research and development initiatives
• Empower team leads to understand the impacts their decisions have on their talent and project profitability
• Understand the health of individual projects and how that contributes to the business’s overall health

What’s next for HUSH?

Next on HUSH’s business planning horizon is identifying additional revenue streams to stabilize monthly revenue. With Parallax, HUSH has the tools to forecast what’s coming down the pipeline and whether the studio is tracking toward projected revenue.

“Parallax has had a significant impact on the health of project P&Ls. Not to mention, I have a much better way to track what the healthy projects are. Healthy projects help us create a healthier business.” – Kristen DiCamillo, Managing Partner, HUSH