Streamline Your Agency Project Management: 4 Proven Strategies for Success

Budding agencies have a lot on their plate and can often find themselves hitting the ground running before they solidify their processes.

It’s common for startups and new agencies to get hyper-focused on quality of deliverables from the jump, which isn’t a bad thing. After all, they’re trying to make a name for themselves and establish a reputation for excellence among a growing client base. 

However, when agency processes and strategic workflows get overlooked, the profitability reports can yield surprises. 

Because some of the project management strategies haven’t exactly been ironed out, there’s money left on the table due to inefficiencies. 

The good news is that it’s never too late to make a positive change. No matter how disorganized or scattered your processes have become, you can streamline them with these 4 proven strategies for agency project management.

1. People first : Dial-in your resource management

First, focus on your people and how they are being leveraged across the agency. This isn’t just about resource allocation, but also involves soft skills. You have to be able to listen and pick up on how individuals are flowing or not within their roles and collaborating with others. 

As part of this resource management glow-up, you’ll want to focus on the following areas:

• Planning and tracking capacity - Capacity planning and tracking is so important because it’s what gives you the ability to maintain balanced workloads. If you don’t know someone’s capacity, how can you know if they’re getting burned out? Or on the flip side, not pulling their weight? Be sure to use a capacity planning tool that will track these metrics in real time to keep team morale high and avoid bottlenecks. 
• Skill matching - Are the right people working on the right projects? The right tasks? Even if you have a small group of people you’re working with, you might not be on the money if you haven’t invested some energy into efficient skill matching. This starts with understanding your agency’s value agenda and figuring out how to drive value across the organization. 
• Utilization reports - Be sure to calculate and track utilization rates among your employees to figure out opportunities for increased efficiency. The capacity utilization formula will tell you how much someone is working against their capacity, whereas billable utilization will show how much of someone’s time is spent on billable hours against total work hours. Both are equally important to track.

2. Promote adaptability: Be flexible with your methodology

Arguably, a project manager’s most valuable quality, and by extension, an entire agency’s, is adaptability. Client demands, shifting market conditions, and a litany of other circumstances out of your control will inevitably arise. 

The question is, will these circumstances affect the quality and profitability of your projects?

The best way to ensure that they don’t is to stay flexible with your project management methodology. Basically, we’re talking about staying agile. 

Use agile cornerstones like iterative development, aka breaking down your projects into sequential steps. Get them highly organized and displayed in a Gantt chart or Kanban board, so that everyone can see these steps playing out in real time. 

This will also promote transparency that’s good for the lifeblood of your agency for stakeholders and team members alike. You may even choose to share this living documentation with your customers in a client portal to elevate transparency even further. 

In short, a flexible, agile approach will help keep your agency prepared for the unexpected, keep projects on time, and keep everyone in the loop who needs to be. 

3. Keep it together: Put all project-related processes in one place

There’s something to be said for a single source of truth, aka having one living digital space where all the necessary project information is kept. When people have to spend time bouncing around different platforms and spreadsheets to find the information they need, you lose out on billable time. 

Especially if your agency includes remote team members, you’ll need to keep everything they need in one space, one ‘hub’ if you will. Otherwise, visibility gets lost and deadlines can quickly get put in jeopardy. 

A lot of agencies and professional services businesses in general suffer from SaaS sprawl, meaning they use too many cloud-based services to go from deal to cash. 

This can easily be eliminated by going with a more all-in-one project management solution, where invoicing, time tracking, tasks, etc. all live together. 

And if you can’t narrow it down to a single solution, the next best thing is to make sure everything is integrated, i.e. the data you need in other tools gets funneled into your single source of truth. 

4. Relieve admin drain: Use automation for manual tasks

Finally, it’s common for many agencies to suffer from admin drain and not even know it. Oftentimes, creatives, developers, and other team members that are valued for their skills and experience are wasting hours per week on menial admin tasks just to keep workflows going. 

For example, when person A finishes a task, the process may require that they then assign the task to another individual, that they brief this individual with the necessary info, and that the task gets moved to a different board. Not too tedious, but these precious minutes spent on admin add up over the course of the project lifecycle. 

Nowadays, most bonafide project management software solutions will let you automate tasks like this. So in the above example, when person A completes the task, you can configure it so that the next person is automatically assigned and briefed and the task gets moved to the correct place by the system. 

All in all, automation and other AI tools will help your people get back to what they do best: creating and serving the customer. And in most cases, these automations are insanely easy to set up and won’t require any backdoor coding knowledge, to boot. 

In sum: Make life easier on your agency

Optimizing your agency project management requires intention and energy, but it won’t take oodles of time. By applying the four strategies discussed here, agency life will be easier with dialed-in resource management, flexible methodologies, a single source of truth, and automation. 

You can get started today for FREE with PSOhub that comes with an industry-leading capacity planning feature, easy-to-configure automations, and so much more.