How does Colonies save time on an everyday basis with Clovis?

Colonies is a start-up that reinvents housing for young adults by offering co-living and shared accommodation in major cities in France and Europe. Colonies offers complete solutions for tenants and investors, from the search for housing, through renovation, to rental management. Interview with Paul Robic, Project Manager at Colonies and a big fan of Clovis!

What is your job, what are the main challenges for Colonies?

I have been a Project Manager at Colonies for about a year now. In my job, I have to juggle between visiting our worksites to ensure that deadlines are met, and working in the office to manage planning and budget.

At Colonies, we have around 120 employees as well as many external service providers: construction companies, logistics teams, electricity and internet providers and others.

Internally, we have several teams working on the same project: the teams that find the apartments, the teams that manage the renovation and services, the teams that manage the apartment once it is put up for rent…

Our main challenge was to centralize all the tasks on a single platform for the teams working on the same site while having different roles in order to facilitate project management.

What were the issues you identified before choosing Clovis?

We were looking for an easy-to-use, intuitive and collaborative solution to manage our projects and to establish reserves. We’ve studied several project management solutions but they were often way too complicated and disproportionate to our needs.

What convinced you that Clovis was the right choice?

While studying different solutions, Clovis quickly stood out for its simplicity and its collaborative aspect! Clovis was also financially attractive, especially for a start-up.

Moreover, what made the difference was the proximity with the Clovis teams - they are attentive, available and they keep us always informed about the latest developments. We can also share our feedback via a dedicated button and we're happy to see that Clovis is working on it - our comments don't go unnoticed.

How did you proceed to deploy Clovis to your teams?

We deployed Clovis in a few steps:

At the very beginning, I had to familiarize myself with the application, then explain how it works to our team members. I became the Clovis referent within our teams.

Then, we created a project model that we use as a starting point for all our projects. You can think of our model as a checklist where we centralize all the information we need for every project.

Next, we created a document structure, to define the rules and to clarify where to stock our documents.

Then, the teams created their first tasks and started managing projects on their own with a remarkable fluidity.

What is the typology of Clovis users at Colonies?

The profiles of our users are diverse: project manager, quality team that establishes reserves, work management, team that manages the property once it is put up for rent…

We are about 25 internal collaborators to use Clovis - about ten very actively, about fifteen for monitoring with read-only access.

What are the results you’ve obtained?

Thanks to Clovis, we have obtained very good results on several levels.

First, Clovis allowed us to standardize our processes, which is very important because we have a multitude of projects to manage at the same time.

Secondly, during the establishment of the reserves, we were able to notice an improvement in the quality of the accommodation we put up for rent.

And finally, our internal communications have been simplified and streamlined.

All this allows us to save time on a daily basis!