AKQA it’s an innovation consultancy, specialised in brand design experience and it’s part of the WPP group. They explore the combination of art and science to create engaging campaigns rooted in inspiring stories.
Since 2018 they adopted Wethod, which supported them in a crucial organisational change. This time we had the chance to interview Umberto Basso, the Chief Executive Officer of AKQA Italy who will guide us through their journey.
“When we adopted wethod we were defining our new organisational model so we took the opportunity to get inspired by its features to shape our workflows.”
Umberto Basso, Managing Director at AKQA
Akqa Italy's team counts about 200 people, and their organisational model has recently shifted from a hierarchical structure to a distributed one. In particular, they transformed static work units made of different expertise (creativity, strategy, design, etc.) into a flexible matrix model, so it was crucial to adopt a system that facilitated this change.
The company's goal was to decrease staffing operations, stimulate people's participation in multiple projects, and direct each unit toward achieving specific goals.
In this regard, Umberto Basso tells us how the biggest change was to simplify and redistribute operations activities within the team. Nowadays they have 4 flexible units that manage the planning within themselves.
Starting with a pilot, AKQA identified the key factor to succeed, taking advantage of wethod support in this massive change.
Before implementing such a transparent and proactive system, AKQA Italian team was facing troubles in getting the information accessible to the business units and people could get easily discouraged by underperforming. Indeed misinterpretation of partial data could trigger a feeling of uncertainty and fear.
Instead, by sharing data democratically, wethod enabled people's increasing participation within workflows.
“The greatest advantage of adopting wethod was to increase the confidence across the company.”
Umberto Basso, Managing Director at AKQA
In this way, the new model adopted by AKQA Italy became distributed: everybody can temporarily assume the responsibility to plan the team, shifting in turns this role among project managers, interns, content designers, and video makers.
For AKQA Italy, confidence came in the form of shared knowledge: each unit can achieve the desired results even in self-management, without having to rely on the finance team to constantly guide them.
An additional benefit they perceived was expertise development: today people master team planning proficiently thanks to an agile and distributed method.
"wethod helps me make decisions in a timely manner: for example, I can see if we need to be more proactive whether it’s necessary to develop organic business or look for entirely new customers."
Umberto Basso, Managing Director at AKQA
This new business model also led to a greater degree of trust from top managers toward the team. As the CEO of AKQA Italia, Umberto Basso said he did not feel the need to personally monitor the progress of projects or negotiations, since he frequently receives this information from other people he trusts. The reason is that thanks to wethod people report weekly the progress of the pipeline as well as the project's status with a good knowledge of the current situation and great accuracy.
"Real-time data and transparency are part of the important change that every company should undertake-it might sound like utopia, but for us it is reality."
Umberto Basso, Managing Director at AKQA
Umberto Basso explains how these two aspects increased the potential to find solutions in people who normally would not even look for them since they have no evidence of data that are normally confidential.
One example is the aversion of most creative roles to worrying about budgets. Usually, creatives will see it as an obstacle between them and the project's success, not realising that the problem was probably a disproportionate ambition toward their resources.
One year later, however, within the AKQA team, the most budget-sensitive person is one of the company's creative directors, who is now always concerned that ideas developed by his team are in line with available resources.
"By sharing seemingly confidential data, even the most creative role develops its own awareness, seeing the project budget no longer as a constraint, but as one of the incentives to challenge their creativity."
Umberto Basso, Managing Director at AKQA