It’s 3 p.m. do you know what your team is doing? You probably have a vague idea. Something along the lines of working on for the Freddy Florist Valentine’s Day campaign, but do you know what the breakdown of everyone’s workload looks like? Freddy Florist is expecting to be presented a plan in two weeks. What would happen if Chocolate Delights calls in an hour and asks you to provide them with a Valentine’s Day plan for them in two weeks as well? Would you know who you can shift from one account to the other?

It’s important to balance your workload

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Too often assignments are doled out based on whoever happens to be walking down the hall at that moment. This can lead to severely unbalanced workloads, contribute to burnout and under-utilization of talent. Bionic’s new workload manager provides the insight to ensure that each team member has just the right amount of work on their plate.

Media plans are living beasts with constantly evolving timelines. Bionic’s workload manager enables you to evaluate precisely how many hours of tasks each person is dealing with. This makes it easy to reallocate responsibilities and reorganize accounts to help divide and conquer. You can even use it to justify hiring more talent when everyone is tapped out.

Handling unexpected absences

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It used to be a nightmare to pick up the slack for a team member who called in sick. You don’t know which projects are impacted and you don’t want to bother your co-worker while they are under the weather. So how do you shift the work to make sure deadlines are met?

Now it’s as easy as opening up Bionic Project Management to view their urgent tasks and assign them to the team members with some wiggle room. The same goes for team members who go on vacation. We used to result to taking time out of our days leading up to a vacation emailing in depth descriptions of what we’re working on to people who may or may not have time to pinch hit for us. That information is now all stored in a database accessible to the entire team. An informed decision can be made on how to best cover the work while they’re out.

Visualize your team’s workload  

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Having a plan of action is key to being successful in media.

In Bionic, a snapshot of the next four weeks of deadlines and deliverables is never more than a click away. Task Radar (the upper portion with the blue and red bars) summarizes your upcoming days so you can better manage your time. Clicking on a specific week or day will bring up the detailed task listing for that time frame. This is customizable based on your filter choices so you can view workloads based on specific task, team member, status, dates and more.

Drill into the details and take action

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The workload report isn’t just a handy visualization. It helps you to dig deeper and take action when necessary. When you click on a bar in the workload diagram, Bionic reveals the list of tasks behind it. You can then select the tasks and reassign, change the due date, abandon, or whatever action is appropriate to resolve the issue. Best of all, Bionic automatically keeps a history of all these changes so it’s never a mystery when tasks “jump around.”

Keep the suggestions coming

In November we rolled out the initial offering of Bionic Project Management to finally offer media teams a system that was flexible enough to adapt to the chaotic media process, while still providing the structure to be sure that everything is on track and deadlines are never missed. Today’s upgrade improves the system allowing you to better track workloads and chart a course for the corresponding weeks.

The very idea for Bionic Project Management was born from a survey we conducted that indicated the need for a system that understood the nuances of media planning and buying. The subsequent function and design were forged in close partnership with customers in order to create something that would fit the unique needs of the industry.

The software needs to work for you. If you see something that needs to be included or could be improved let us know at support

[at]bionic-ads.com

How do I get workload management?

If you’re already using Bionic, workload management will be ready to go the next time you log in. You’ll also notice the new color coding feature and a more powerful cloning tool. Unlimited training and support is part of your Bionic subscription so don’t hesitate to contact us.

If you aren’t yet using Bionic media planning software you can learn more, see a demo, and request a trial here: https://bionic-ads.com/planner/