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As an agency owner, it's critical to manage your team’s time efficiently, keep clients happy, and monitor your profitability if you want to grow your business into a successful agency.
Without scalable processes in place, it’s easy to get lost in the confusing chaos of never-ending email threads, missed deadlines, and breakdowns in communication.
We can break successful project management for agencies into three main areas:
Clear communication between the team, contractors, and clients
Accurate tracking of deliverables, deadlines, progress, and results
Regular analysis of those results to improve processes, evolve workflows, address issues, and ensure the agency stays profitable
This guide will share some tips on how project management can be streamlined and simplified, helping bring your agency into a new era!
The importance of agency project management
By implementing great agency project management, you can deliver great work for your clients every time. Great agency project management allows you to stay on time, on budget and increase your profitability. You won't have any guesswork when it comes to resourcing, your time tracking will be accurate to the minute and you no longer have to worry about under utilization of resources. Great agency project management allows you to understand where billable hours are going, streamline client approvals and so much more. As an agency project manager, you have to keep many irons in the fire, agency project management processes will allow you to get your head above water.
An effective agency project management process:
Before we dive into the deep end of project management, let’s have a quick top-level look at the lifecycle of an average agency project:
1) Client onboarding and research
Many agencies start with a discovery phase, which includes a few meetings between the client and the agency.
You need to clarify what is already in place regarding their website and marketing, future ambitions and goals, and the key problems your agency aims to solve during the project.
With the client’s side of the project scoped out, agencies can do more in-depth research into the client’s website, marketing plans, and social media during a full audit. Once you have that information, your agency can build out a solid online strategy and set clear KPIs (key performance indicators) for the client to approve.
2) Content and design
Once your agency and the client agree on the scope of work and the client approves your strategy, it’s time for creative projects: content creation and design.
Writers create content that fits with the client company’s brand voice, and designers create mockups and wireframes to which developers will build the website. But, if you find yourself stuck on content creation, AI writer tools can be incredibly useful for generating creative ideas and overcoming writer's block. If the client has professional photography completed, this happens during the first couple of weeks of the project.
Clients give feedback, then approve the work, allowing the project to move on to the next phase.
3) Development
A team of web developers takes the approved designs and content to create a stunning new website (or app, or whatever it is they’re building!)
In the testing phase, the QA team ensures that everything works as it should, fixing any bugs and issues along the way.
Once everything’s running smoothly, the client gets access to the final product. From there, they'll either approve it or bounce it back to the agency project team for revisions.
4) Launch
When the development team and client are happy with the final product, it’s time for the project to launch. All that hard work is released into the world, bringing in leads, conversions, and sales. (But that’s just the beginning!)
5) Post-launch
To ensure continued success, the agency monitors the project to see what works and doesn’t. At some point after the launch, agencies compile a report ready for the client to discuss results and what can be improved to keep achieving the goals set in the beginning.
Depending on the contract and the services offered by the agency, these reports can turn into weekly or monthly marketing campaign updates. Meeting periodically allows you and the client to communicate regularly and adjust strategies as needed, which will help you better meet the client's changing needs over time.
Speaking of time, we know your time is limited, so let’s get right to it.
Here’s how to keep track of your projects through every step of the web design and marketing journey and ensure smooth communication with your clients and your team.
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How to keep your agency's project's on track, on time, and within budget
The obstacles
It can be tough to keep an overview of what needs to be prioritized and get an efficient workflow going, as endless projects land on our desks and our to-do list starts to resemble Matrix-like lines of never-ending code cascading down our screens.
Starting to feel overwhelmed? You’re not the only one.
Teams in agencies of all sizes get to this point. But before the morale is completely down, it’s time for the person in charge to come to the rescue. No agency owner or project manager wants to overwhelm their team.
To prevent standards from going AWOL and for everyone to keep a cool head, PMs need to have an overview of what everyone is working on and a way to shift priorities in an easily customizable way. This way, you'll know who has more working capacity, who’s under too much pressure, and what projects are heading toward the danger zone.
“Without Teamwork.com, we would still be using an endless amount of Google Sheets to manage our ongoing project work. We made this work with a small client list, but now we have the tools to meet deadlines as more projects and clients come to us.” ~ Ryan Jones, Digital Marketing Executive at Imaginaire Digital
Read the Imaginaire Digital story.
The solutions
If you’re aspiring to be a project management hero, you might go off and dig out that Gantt chart planner you created a few months ago. But before you stress yourself out hunting for spreadsheets hidden in your Google Drive, there's an easier way.
With the Workload feature in Teamwork.com, you can get instant insights into multiple client projects at one time — including a quick summary of what every team member is up to, project timelines, and individual task progress.
A handy Capacity Bar displays where each team member is in the design/build process. To help you stay profitable for every project, you can view the hours each team member has spent working on a project and how much work there is still to go.
Get your Sherlock hat and pipe handy and go on a deeper dive into the Planner View to see a breakdown of the workload and capacity of each team member. This way, you can find free slots to allocate.
For example, one team member might show as busy in the overview, but when you investigate, it turns out that they are inundated on some days but are barely utilized on others. If that's the case for a couple of team members, you can allocate and share tasks by dragging and dropping them, restoring balance to the world like a true project management hero.
When allocating tasks, you can add as much detail as you want, and add as many resources as needed to get the job done — without overwhelming your team. Teamwork.com adapts to your agency’s unique agency processes, growing with you and adapting to your needs.
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Streamlining communication in agency project management
The obstacles
After assigning tasks to your team, you lean back and think you’ve earned yourself a nice cup of coffee. That’s it, right? Your team will be happy to work on their tasks and you’ll get on with your own.
Well, that might be the case at first. Then you go on your well-deserved coffee break and come back to an inbox full of questions.
The copywriter is looking for a client brief so that they can get started.
The designer is searching for the notes with the feedback you took during the client call last week.
Ding! Another message pops up to notify you that your client is requesting a status report.
You vaguely remember that somebody started on that last week, but where did they put it? Which app did you use to take notes during that meeting, and where did you save it? Is the client brief saved in its usual place, or did the new salesperson save it straight to their laptop?
When instructions, files, feedback, and resources get lost in a clutter of emails, chaos ensues. Your team can easily get frustrated, as they spend half their time looking for files or clarity on who is in charge of what.
Not to mention, it piles more work onto your plate — and you have enough to worry about.
Once again, team members will look to project managers to step up, activate that superhero brain, and have all the answers. Multiple clients and projects will quickly overwhelm your team. You might be an aspiring project management hero, but you don’t have the storage capacity of a supercomputer. And you don’t have to.
“The in-built tools of time tracking in Teamwork.com and the Teamwork Chat app have enabled us to cancel our subscriptions with other, separate solutions, and to roll up our requirements into one tool. We wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone.” ~ Laura Hampton, Head of Marketing and PR at Impression Digital
Read the Impression Digital story.
The solutions
Store everything (and we mean everything) in one place. You can store all communications between team members and clients in one place and have a record of all decisions for each project. This keeps everyone on the team in the know about their responsibilities, lets your clients access the status of their project easily.
You can track billable (and non-billable) time and get a better handle on project and resource management with full visibility for you, your team, and your clients in that one central space. With different access levels available, you can also keep some resources or threads designated for internal use only — which keeps private information away from unauthorized parties.
Instead of getting lost in an email chain, all your communications around projects will go where they belong — with a specific task, designated to the person who will be working on it. Hello, increased efficiency!
If there are still some unanswered questions about a particular project, team members can use Teamwork Chat to set up project channels. Project channels automatically include everyone involved in a particular project, so it’s easy to find the person with the answers to your questions.
Did you know that you can also pull in other collaboration tools you love into Teamwork.com? Easily transfer data between Teamwork.com and other software via seamless integrations for an efficient workflow.
Teamwork.com provides one central space for files that every team member (and client) can use as a reference point. Your team is happy knowing their responsibilities and being assured that they have the resources to reach their deadlines, and your clients are happy that their projects are running smoothly.
How to automate your agency's projects
The obstacles
Every day repetitive tasks that might not seem time-consuming at first glance can soon add up, costing your team time that they could spend on more important work to keep your clients happy. For example, there is no need to draw up a new invoice every time you bill a client, manually add new events to your Google Calendar, or create new project outlines from scratch.
On your way to becoming an agency project management hero, you want to eliminate your arch enemies: manual and duplicate work. It’s easy to get carried away and lose sight of what could be done more efficiently when you’re stuck in the weeds of things.
Manual and duplicate work sucks the time out of your day, frustrates you and your team, and has long-term effects on your agency.
“Another of the tools that do practical and fast work is the use of templates, with which we can automate the entire planning process and organization just by having a template that assembles all the tasks and distributes them in an order and appropriate times.” ~ G2 Crowd
The solutions
Now that you know that repetitive manual tasks can waste a ton of time, it’s time to figure out exactly which of these processes and administrative tasks you can automate.
If you put your magnifying glass over your team's daily tasks, does the entire setup for a project need to be done manually for each client? What about client reports and invoices? Should you create these manually every time you need them? You’re well on your way to becoming an agency project management hero if your answer to these questions is a clear "NO."
You would be astounded to know that as of 2020, only 23% of project managers use project management software, according to Wellingtone.
Free yourself from repetition!
By embracing templates, you can ensure that your projects, processes, and client experience stays consistent across your agency. In Teamwork.com, you can create project and task list templates to reduce setup time at the beginning of your projects. The chance of errors is also significantly reduced if all team members use the same uniform documents for reports and invoices. Some great templates for agencies to start with are the client onboarding, digital marketing plan, and OKR templates.
As you move through your project's workflow, you can also set up triggers in Board View. You can set up a trigger that changes who a task is assigned to when it moves from one stage of the working process to the next.
For example, one team member might be responsible for writing a piece of content, while another is in charge of proofreading. In Board View, you can drag and drop the task from ‘Work in Progress’ to ‘Review,’ and when triggers are set up, the assignee changes automatically. Gone are the days of manually emailing your teammates to let them know something is done!
Are you and your team members tired of moving data between all the different apps you use? You can mitigate this using Automate.io, which connects two cloud-based apps and helps tie in your Shopify, Gmail, or WordPress accounts with Teamwork.com.
The connection works by combining triggers to complete one action in an app when a trigger occurs in another. Combine these triggers and actions, and you get a bot that automates your processes.
When you need to find out the status of a project, you can set up custom dashboards to view project health (and all the other information you need) at a glance instead of having to drill down and examine every single task.
You can even automate project status and health updates to save time manually reporting project progress.
If, after all that, there are still some pesky repetitive tasks scuttling around, catch them all by setting a daily, weekly, or monthly reminder to get them all completed in one go.
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How to avoid bottlenecks in agency project management
The obstacles
As your agency grows and you have to keep track of hundreds of tasks across multiple projects at a time, you might get caught in your cape and fall, frantically scanning task lists for the information you need.
Where are we at with deliverable A on project A? Where’s report B for project B? Where can I find a status update for project C?
Chances are that your team members are suffering a similar fate, lost in a confusing pool of messages questioning each other about the status of tasks while another deadline they were unaware of sails by.
Avoid the time-consuming flood of emails and chat messages and the lack of overview of deadlines. We’ll show you how to keep your team on track for the successful completion of your project and happy clients who recommend your agency to other businesses.
“My stress is way down because my team members are in the driver’s seat, and I know what’s happening every day. I’m focused on priorities, mentoring, resources, and supporting them with clients when discussing strategy, etc. This is what a CEO needs to do; I’m not spending time on red tape, and trying to figure out what’s going on.” ~ Kfir Pravda, Agency Owner/CEO at Pravda Media Group
Read the Pravda Media Group story.
The solutions
To keep your team happy, an agency project management hero should always be able to get an overview of where all projects stand at any time. This way, you know your resources and your team's current capacity to make informed decisions and delineate project roles.
Be sure to set up realistic deadlines from the start and make your agency a no-stress zone, as everyone is aware of what is expected from them and is getting the job done in the time they need.
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In Teamwork.com, you can get a quick overview of multiple projects in the project view. Filter by project health to see at a glance what needs to be prioritized or escalated to keep your team working successfully. Don’t forget to add these “Latest project updates” and “Project health breakdown” filters to your dashboard.
If you want to look at a specific project, use the dashboard or project summary and get a breakdown of tasks, milestones, project budget, and more.
Whenever a quick overview is not working for you to allocate tasks, drill down to see how workloads are distributed in more detail. This will give you better insight into which team members are free to take on more work or who might need some support to finish on time.
Avoid bottlenecks by shifting priorities and relocating work.
With a clear overview, you’ll be able to catch the right moment for a change of plan. We know that we can’t control most of these changes, but as project management heroes, we’re going to control how we deal with change efficiently.
Clear communication is key, and preferably we don’t want to switch around between 10 different tools to communicate with other team members and clients.
Use the project messages feature in Teamwork.com to get information across efficiently. You can put any important information, files, or links about the project into a message. Here are some quick tips on good project message etiquette:
Make sure the message has a title that clearly tells the reader what the message is about. Clear communication means never leave the reader guessing!
Keep a thread dedicated to one topic only, and move any other conversations to a new thread.
Ensure that you only add team members to the thread that need to learn about the information you’re sharing. Having too many voices involved in a discussion can complicate things; hammer out the details with the need-to-knows, and relay the final decisions to the rest of the team (or stakeholders) later on.
Save any documentation that needs to be reviewed to the files or links area of the project that everyone can access.
Be clear about action items. Make sure team members know their responsibilities and the due dates for their action items.
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How to maintain agency profitability with better project management
The obstacles
"How long will it take?"
If you had a nickel for every time you heard that...
For some agency project management heroes out there, this question can turn into a daunting nightmare, as you struggle to estimate how long deliverables will take and which resources you might need to get the job done as quickly as possible.
If only you had a tool that keeps track of how much time a piece of content or a design took your team to get ready in the past; a tool that would tell you how much time it will take you to complete the next project and ensure profitability.
You do have a few spreadsheets and Gantt charts set up that you could consult to retrieve that kind of information, but it would be a time-consuming process that you don’t want to have to squeeze into your already-busy schedule.
It may be time to find the sidekick to your hero in an agency project management software like Teamwork.com.
“We've been able to really mine the data so we can pull out reports on pretty much everything that we need in terms of how long people are working on things and then we can drill down into why it takes so long to do certain things, how long on average it takes to do certain tasks, which teams are hitting the targets and which aren't which individuals are delivering what they should be.” ~ Nicci Beacham, Project and Quality Manager at Liberty Marketing
The solutions
In Teamwork.com’s Workload feature, you can get instant, accurate data insights into your team’s efficiency and determine how much time they need for certain deliverables. You can also measure billable and non-billable hours to get a better picture of what your team is capable of. Then you can set up time budgets from the outset to ensure that your team uses time as efficiently as possible.
If priorities are shifting (and let’s be honest, they often do), you can change course alongside them instead of scrambling to get the work done. Generate project or task list time reports to track progress against the agreed timeline and budget.
With these reports under your superhero belt, you can react quickly and know where workflows need to be adjusted to save the day and steer clear of the rocky waters of last-minute changes.
With dashboards set up, you can track project time budgets and billable time completed to see immediately when projects are at risk of becoming overdue or unprofitable. With all this data at your disposal, you can swoop in and answer all your clients’ questions on timelines, track the success of your projects, and then spot where improvements are needed in your processes.
The bottom line
Project management is truly an artform in itself. It takes dedication and drive to unite your team and your clients to create an unforgettable online experience.
Whether you’re an agency owner or project manager at a creative, web design, marketing, ad or digital agency, we know it’s not always an easy road to becoming an agency project management hero. But with the tools and tips shared throughout this guide, paired with the right project management solution to support it all, you will be well on your way to having the best project management team.
In fact, here at Teamwork.com, we started our journey as a digital agency, so we know firsthand what agency owners and project managers need to scale their operations and increase profits. Our project management software was built specifically for agencies like you — and is the go-to for over 6,000 agencies around the world. Sign up for Teamwork.com and to give us a try for free.
Other resources for agencies:
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