Charcoalblue Bridges Creative and Construction with Planera

Charcoalblue, a leading theater, acoustics and experiential consultancy, uses Planera’s visual platform to bring project control and schedule literacy to their creative delivery teams for complex experiential projects.

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Company Overview

Charcoalblue began 20 years ago as a theater consultancy, designing and delivering theaters and event spaces, including global Google event spaces. The company's approach is unique: nearly 90% of their 150-person team comes from a theater or live entertainment background, providing collaborative, creative expertise across a wide variety of disciplines, and they require continuity with their tooling to support these processes and improve efficiency.

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CHALLENGE

Translating Creativity into Construction

Charcoalblue's primary value is translating high-expectation creative visions into the realities of construction platforms for efficient project execution. This was a particular challenge in the highly structured Middle East construction environment for the Abu Dhabi Natural History Museum project, where traditional tools like Primavera P6 and OPC proved to be significant hurdles:

• Steep Learning Curve: Tools like P6 and OPC made achieving schedule fluency across creative teams challenging and costly.
• Lack of Engagement from Creatives: Creative content builders—such as those composing music and building video content—would not engage with traditional scheduling software, and do not have a dedicated staff member for scheduling.
• Platform Disconnect: A need existed to bridge the gap between creative teams and construction platforms, which often relied on outdated methods like predetermined P6 layouts and manual Excel dashboards.

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SOLUTION

Planera’s Visual Interface and Real-Time Visibility

Charcoalblue adopted Planera to provide a more intuitive and visual planning platform for their team, quickly raising the entire company's schedule literacy.

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Planera proved to be a "game-changer" on the Natural History Museum project, enabling Charcoalblue to:

• Onboard Creatives Quickly: The visual interface greatly alleviated the learning curve compared to P6 and OPC, making it possible to get people on board in an hour.
• Ensure Real-Time Status Updates: They could easily solicit status updates from creative content builders who would never use traditional scheduling software, providing real-time visibility into content progress.
• Facilitate Distributed Collaboration: The cloud-based platform saved significant time by enabling asynchronous work across distributed teams in the UAE, UK, Canada, and the US.
• Manage Dual Schedules: Planera was leveraged for both a master schedule (to track overall progress) and field/working schedules (to solicit updates from multiple internal stakeholder teams).

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RESULTS

Greater Schedule Literacy and Project Control

By integrating Planera into their project controls, Charcoalblue achieved improved team alignment and schedule management on their complex projects:

• High Adoption Rate: Our primary Creative content design and delivery partner on the Abu Dhabi project began building their own internal schedules in Planera, demonstrating the platform’s organic usability.  By providing multiple options to view and manipulate the schedules, it allowed for the varied comfort levels and approaches of the teams. 
• Mitigated Project Challenges: Planera helped mitigate challenges to oversight and collaboration, particularly with contractors who were highly resistant to new methods.
• Industry Recognition: The Project Management Institute is highlighting Charcoalblue’s work as a model for bridging formal scheduling with the creative industries.

Conclusion

Planera enables Charcoalblue to empower their non-traditional, creative-first team with a scheduling solution that is both visual and robust. The platform's ease of use raises the entire company's schedule literacy, providing critical project control and real-time visibility on some of the world's most complex and high-expectation experiential projects.

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