Untangling a creative agency's tool stack.
The agency had every tool it needed. What it didn't have was any agreement about which tool did what — so every new hire ended up on the ops manager's desk.
New hires kept landing on the ops manager's desk.
Slack, Asana, Notion, Google Workspace, plus specialist tools for marketing, design, and client work. Plenty of software. No shared understanding of what any of it was for.
SOPs sat wherever they happened to be written. Where a project's information lived depended on who set it up. Onboarding a new person meant the operations manager walking them through it personally, every time.
Too many tools wasn't the issue. No boundaries between them was.
The audit looked at how the tools were actually being used versus what they were capable of. The same pattern kept appearing — tools overlapping with no rules about who owned what:
- Several tools stored the same kind of information, with nothing designating which was authoritative
- SOPs and templates existed but were scattered, with no central home
- Slack carried everything indiscriminately, so the critical updates disappeared into the noise
If your team has a tool for everything and clarity on none of it, that's not a tools problem. It's a boundaries problem.
One stack, with defined roles and the connections to match.
We decided what to keep, what to retire, and what to repurpose — then wired the survivors together so work moved through them instead of around them.
Notion became the hub: SOPs, meeting notes, strategy, client requirements, timelines. Asana narrowed to project tracking, with client request forms and reusable templates. Slack got quieter and more useful, integrated with the others so updates reached the right people automatically.
Delivered alongside it:
- A defined core purpose for each tool, with the redundancies removed
- SOPs, templates, notes, and strategy consolidated in Notion
- Notion timelines linking directly into Asana for execution
- Asana intake forms for client requests, with templates built in
- Slack integrated with Asana and Google Workspace for automatic notifications
- A deprecation policy to stop the stack quietly expanding again
- A “which tool for what” reference guide
- A live training workshop, plus Loom tutorials covering setup and best practice across every platform
A stack the team can actually navigate.
The team now works inside a clearly defined, integrated environment. Information has a home, project intake is a form rather than a conversation, and updates arrive in Slack on their own.
Onboarding got faster, and the constant tool-switching stopped.
If your team has a tool for everything and clarity on none of it, start with the audit.
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