The Definitive Guide to Agency Project Management
An agency handles several tasks required to deliver on their clients’ projects. Whether it’s onboarding new customers or creating deliverables and rendering services, it takes a system to make it all work.
And it all boils down to project management.
Project management is simply the art of organizing your objectives, breaking them down, and working on them until you get your desired outcome.
So, whether it’s PPC advertising, content marketing, or web design, the essence of the work agencies do is all about project management. Agencies are contracted to handle projects and the tasks attached on behalf of their clients—which, in essence, is project management.
Now, since project management is the backbone of any agency looking to delight customers and drive continuous growth, it takes project management software to successfully run an agency.
In this article, you’ll learn:
- The benefits of project management software for agencies,
- The key questions to ask before you choose a project management tool, and
- How the ideal project management tool will transform the work of every stakeholder on your team.
Benefits of running your agency with project management software
Project management holds the key to consistently creating stellar work that delights your customers and grows your agency business. And these benefits can only be harnessed by running your business with project management tools designed with your business’s needs in mind.
Here are the key benefits of project management software in running an agency.
1. Increased transparency
The most significant feature of an agency is that it’s smaller than conventional companies. As a result, everyone works in tighter-knit teams and shares information peer-to-peer. This makes it easy to build silos where teams focus on just their own part of the bigger picture.
However, this creates a disconnect and leads to duplication of efforts and poorly executed tasks.
Project management software creates a single source of truth so that while individuals and teams can focus on their priorities, they can as well keep an eye on how the bigger picture is developing and adjust their work to adapt accordingly.
2. Effective communication
Project management software offers agency teams of all sizes a simple tool where everyone can communicate and stay up to date with the knowledge they need to do their best work.
Not a big deal, you think?
Actually, it is. And it’s far bigger than you think. According to McKinsey, knowledge workers spend 2 hours daily researching and searching for the files and tools they need to function effectively.
Project management software shortens the knowledge-building process and makes it easier for teammates to communicate and share information faster.
3. Simplified data reporting
At the end of each month, agencies typically need to report the outcomes of their work to customers. And that’s when the team leads start hopping through Excel sheets and a mind-numbing number of files to get all the figures straight.
Using project management software can relieve this headache. By managing your work all in one place, it becomes easy to extract the data hidden in it into reports and analytics with a few clicks of a button.
Project management software simplifies outcome reporting so that agencies can stay transparent without stress.
4. Saved costs
What’s the hidden cost of spending hours shuffling through spreadsheets? Of course, you don’t get billed for that, but that’s primetime you and your teammates could have used to work on revenue-generating customers’ work.
Project management software cuts the time spent on manual admin tasks so you can focus on more interesting and rewarding work.
On every count, project management software holds the key to success in agency management since it’s the only way agencies can communicate and automate manual work.
Features to expect in an agency project management software
Now we know the benefits your agency stands to gain from adopting a project management software. Here it’s important to note that these benefits can only be derived if the following features are built into the project management tool you use.
Long story short, if you’re shopping for PM software, keep your eyes wide open for benefits and, even wider, for the features that cause them.
1. Task management
An ideal project management tool should enable you to create, assign, track, and manage tasks among your team members. Tasks help you break work into manageable bits and track them from start to completion.
2. Communication
Communication ensures the flow of knowledge throughout your team. Whether it’s via chat, @mentions, or notifications, a project management tool should make it easy to connect and share knowledge with team members.
3. File sharing
Rather than email or non-conventional apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, file sharing built into your project management software creates the right avenue for team members to exchange documents with ease.
4. Time tracking
Your agency may make use of freelancers or even pay in-house experts hourly. Time tracking will help you keep a record of how much time is largely spent on tasks and projects so you can pay your team for their efforts and bill clients appropriately.
5. Reporting and analytics
Reporting gives you an easy way to instantly measure aspects of how your agency business is running such as how many deliverables you’ve made over a duration of time or even how much work a client brings you monthly (say, for discount purposes).
Reports collect all the data your agency operations generate and present them in a manner you can make sense of.
Ultimately, project management software serves as the ultimate agency-management tool for organizing and managing all the tasks required to run an agency from start to success.
How a project management software can benefit your agency’s stakeholders
Operating an agency typically involves several individuals who have a stake in the agency’s day-to-day operations. Here’s a brief breakdown of how project management software can benefit everyone individually.
1. The agency owner
You, the agency owner, need to keep operations running smoothly, build a great brand, and stay profitable.
Reports and analytics provide agency owners like you a source of truth where you can monitor your agency’s operations and track its health over time.
2. Team leaders/project managers
Team leads need robust task-management features to be able to assign tasks to individuals and maintain transparency into the work they’re doing per time and how it’ll affect client projects. Project management software can provide that.
3. Team members
Project management software gives team members a clear vision of what they’ve been assigned and helps them communicate with other collaborators.
At the end of the day, project management software determines how successful each stakeholder can be and, ultimately, how the entire agency fares.
Conclusion
Kissflow Project exemplifies the ideal agency project management tool for teams in 2021. Using Kissflow, your agency can:
- Create, assign, and track tasks with maximum visibility,
- Communicate effectively, no matter your team’s size,
- Track the time spent on individual tasks and bigger projects,
- Report and analyze data with just a few clicks, and
- Stay compliant with data security regulations.
All these capabilities will help you run a successful agency that can delight your clients and drive revenue.
Take Kissflow Project for a spin here.
