How to Embrace Project Management for Agencies
Not having a solid project management plan in place can make or break the success of your agency. The lack can result in time wasted in endless meetings, project delays, and unhappy clients who don't refer the new business that helps you grow. If you can get solid project management in place, it pays off in spades with happy clients, happy employees, and positive growth.
Project Management Isn't Just About the Software
Establishing good project management policies is not just a matter of purchasing a new piece of software, but streamlining your organization's business processes. Even the best software out there won't have much of an impact if everyone isn't on the same page on how you're planning to use it.
What to Look For in Project Management Software
Single Source of Truth
A solid project management plan has everyone relying on a single source of truth. Instead of jumping between multiple emails, file systems, and different sheets, it's critical for everyone to have their information and data in one place, up to date, and in sync. In order for this to be successful, everyone needs to rely on the same system and have similar expectations on where to find it.
Clear roles and responsibilities
It's important to establish clear roles and responsibilities on your team, and back them up with business processes. Who is in charge of contacting the client and when? What is the order of operations that needs to happen in order for a client project to be finished? A solid project management system has an established business process that makes it clear who is the responsible party across a sequenced list of tasks. If you can find a tool that allows you to keep track of and then manage the tasks, all the better, but it's most important first to identify the parties involved.
Organized project plans
From your initial proposal to the first time you interact with a client, having an organized project plan is a key part of setting expectations with the client. This helps keep your projects from ballooning out of control, and gives you important insight into how to allocate resources so everything is being used to its best advantage. Software can support this by giving you the framework to keep track of the progress of the plan and how you're tracking against it, but it's important to establish the plans, first.
Enable reuse of time and effort
Effective agencies will be able to do work once, and then leverage it in many places. For example, a response to a request for proposal may be something that you spend many hours laboring over, but it should be easily at hand for the next time when another client has a similar ask. Similarly, if you go through the effort to put together project plans, status updates, reports, and other materials, it's critical that you can share the knowledge and templates that you develop from one project to another. Effective project management tools will give you the ability to search across your resources and quickly find and identify what you need.
Scalable knowledge management
If you were to double the size of your team, would your project management plan be able to keep up? Rather than having the effectiveness of your organization rely on one or two key people, it's important to ensure that you have a system in place that makes sure that the knowledge that you're gathering as an organization is getting written down and can be found by others.
Organize Your Projects with Notejoy
Notejoy makes it fast and easy to get your team on the same page and manage clients with its powerful and easy to use product.
- Real-Time Collaboration - As a cloud-based solution, Notejoy allows you to share your goals with internal and external collaborators. Leverage Notejoy not just for internal policies and wikis, but also for sharing information with clients.
- Always in Sync - Rather than managing different versions of content or multiple threads of conversation, Notejoy allows the entire team to always see the same content including changes and discussions at the same time.
- Keep Documents in One Searchable Place - have one place to keep track of and maintain one system of record for your team's plans and documents. Manage who has access to what information, and enable team members old and new to search across past and current goals.
Get started with Notejoy for free