“RedmineUP Cloud helped us to scale our business” – case study B152

B152, one of the leading and fastest-growing consulting businesses in Russia, used the RedmineUP Cloud tool to scale business operations. Now they shares the results in a case study. .

B152 was founded in 2011 in Moscow, Russia. It is the first company specializing in GDPR and compliance with Personal Data Protection law in Russia. Its experts advise about protecting their clients’ data. The company continues to be one of the leading and fastest-growing consulting businesses. Its team has helped more than eight thousand clients, including Philips, Henkel, and Whirlpool.

B152 employs twenty-five people, fifteen of whom use RedmineUP Cloud. In the early stages of the company, they faced two problems: (1) how to scale the growing number of projects and (2) how to handle incoming support requests. At that time, the company used Trello for projects and handled incoming inquiries directly from email.

Max Lagutin, founder and CEO, describes the situation. “When our business started to grow dynamically, we needed to find better and more scalable tools. I wanted to have all history of cooperation and communication in one place for immediate access. We checked the most popular tools, such as JIRA, Bitrix, and Megaplan, but they lacked some features, or the price was quite high.”

“Kirill Bezrukov introduced me to the system in 2016. I must admit that RedmineUP at the beginning seemed flawed. For me, the interface seemed oldish (as JIRA’s UI seemed more intuitive), and ‘out-of-the-box’ implementation did not meet our needs for managing projects. Yet, our project manager liked the Helpdesk functionality. Kirill helped us to configure the system for our work and adjust it to our needs. Then it started to run well, and the price/quality is excellent.”

Sergey Muslaev, project manager for B152, describes his experience with the trial. “We always have a huge number of projects associated with security audits for our clients. In the beginning, it seemed pretty hard to fully integrate your system with our work. To use it successfully, you need to have some basics, or it might take you a long time to organize your work in Redmine. Kirill helped us to configure it and showed us how the system worked.”

B152’s approach to projects

The B152 team organizes their work in a nonstandard way. They use tasks (issues) to handle separate projects for each client, not different projects. Each new project is an independent task. They currently have around fifty active projects managed in RedmineUP Cloud. Tasks have seven statuses, reprinting seven stages from the introductory meeting with the client up to the moment of signing the final documents. They contain all information about the project, client, and complete documentation.

Max Lagutin, CEO Agile board is cool!
I have all information visually in one place.

“Because we collect a lot of information, all messages and documents are attached to the task either manually or using your dropbox. We just forward the message with attachments, and it’s added automatically to the task. That’s a handy feature.” — Sergey

Projects/tasks are further assigned to an executive. For micromanagement, B152 uses subtasks for each activity, such as interviews or preparing documentation. Subtasks have one of four statuses. To plan the team’s work for a day or a week and keep a record of closed tasks, Sergey uses backlog and sprint planner. For day-to-day management, he uses an Agile board and a Gantt chart for an overview.

Max uses an Agile board, a Gantt chart, and reports to have control over projects and teams.

Customer Support

The client support team has three employees who are responsible for answering questions and handling any problematic situation.

“We use standard implementation of your Helpdesk. What we found useful are autoresponders for receiving the tickets and closing them. In the end, a client can vote and rate how the case was solved. That’s great, as we can see the big picture and track employees’ work, response time, and, if necessary, react, give advice, or help them.” — Sergey

How has RedmineUP Cloud helped you?

“We use only SaaS services to run our business—managing office activities, telephony, project management. I like that you host RedmineUP Cloud, and we don’t have to download, install, or maintain any system, and the quality of products is really good for the price.” — Max

Sergey Muslaev, PM We handle incoming requests faster and can track all activities. Your tool helped us when we scaled. It was smooth and natural. When we started, we had two users who worked with Redmine to manage the projects, but as the company grew we could successfully operate our human resources, track the state of projects, assign tasks, and track the line of the project.