Organizing Chaos: 5 ways to improve agency project management [Webinar]
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Recorded webinar: https://vimeo.com/153284044 Managing client projects can be overwhelming. Whether it’s new client requests, overloaded creatives or approval bottlenecks, something always seems to go wrong. Projects are late, clients are mad and your agency loses time and money. For the most part, chaos abounds. But it doesn’t have to. In this webinar you will learn: How to take control of the request management process How to keep track of project statuses with real-time data How you can reduce resource stress and make more time for creative work And much more. Sponsor content by Workfront.
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Organizing Chaos: 5 ways to improve agency project management [Webinar]
- 1. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only1 Managing Client Projects 5 Ways to Improve Agency Project Management Rachel Davis, Sr. Program Manager, Rockfish Jon Hawkins, Solutions Engineer, Workfront
- 2. • Introductions • Poll Question • 5 Ways to Improve Agency Project Management • Q&A © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only2 Agenda
- 3. Presenters Rachel Davis Sr. Program Manager – Rockfish Jon Hawkins Manager, Solutions Engineering – Workfront © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only3
- 4. Audience Poll: What is the biggest frustration you face at your agency? © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only4
- 5. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only5 1. Attack of the Work Requests
- 6. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only6 Long on work. Short on time.
- 7. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only7 40% of marketing firms say when they miss deadlines, it’s due to general chaos. 30% of workers say poor work prioritization methods are a major barrier to getting work done.
- 8. Gain Control of the Request Management Process © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only8
- 9. GAIN CONTROL OF THE REQUEST MANAGEMENT PROCESS • Centralize request management © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only9
- 10. GAIN CONTROL OF THE REQUEST MANAGEMENT PROCESS • Assign a traffic manager to prioritize and distribute the work © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only10
- 11. GAIN CONTROL OF THE REQUEST MANAGEMENT PROCESS • Know your resources’ availability © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only11
- 12. 2. The Resource Conundrum © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only12
- 13. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only13 I can’t balance my team’s workload.
- 14. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only14 More than 1/3 of workers admit that a lack of standard processes get in the way of productivity. 66% of workers say they don’t have enough time to get their work done.
- 15. Reduce Resource Stress and Make Time for Creative Work © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only15
- 16. REDUCE RESOURCE STRESS AND MAKE TIME FOR CREATIVE WORK • Reduce the interruptions and busy work © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only16
- 17. REDUCE RESOURCE STRESS AND MAKE TIME FOR CREATIVE WORK • Provide visibility into commitments © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only17
- 18. REDUCE RESOURCE STRESS AND MAKE TIME FOR CREATIVE WORK • Understand the urgency of every request © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only18
- 19. REDUCE RESOURCE STRESS AND MAKE TIME FOR CREATIVE WORK • Allow resources to be people too! © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only19 Planned work Urgent/ad-hoc requests Internal tasks 32 – 35 hours 3 – 5 hours 2 – 3 hours 40-hour workweek breakdown
- 20. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only20 3. The Work Status Black Hole
- 21. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only21 I can’t see where work is in the process.
- 22. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only22 On average, 2 in 5 projects do not meet their original goals and business intent, and ½ of those unsuccessful projects are related to ineffective communications. 40% of employees think status update meetings waste valuable time. 67% say they spend up to 4 hours per week getting ready for their next status update meeting.
- 23. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only23 Solve the Status Mystery
- 24. SOLVE THE STATUS MYSTERY • Reduce the resistance © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only24
- 25. SOLVE THE STATUS MYSTERY • Get real-time status updates © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only25
- 26. One Project, Different Views SOLVE THE STATUS MYSTERY • Provide customized communication © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only26 Client View Project Manager View Executive View Project Team View
- 27. SOLVE THE STATUS MYSTERY • Remember to pad hours to allow time for status updates © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only27 Planned work Urgent/ad-hoc requests Internal tasks 32 – 35 hours 3 – 5 hours 2 – 3 hours 40-hour workweek breakdown
- 28. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only28 4. Stuck in Approvals Again
- 29. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only29 The trouble with creative reviews
- 30. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only30 92% of marketers say the top reason they miss deadlines is approval delays. One agency found that the briefing and approval process was driving a 15% over resourcing in account management, representing a $120,000 per year impact on their retainer.
- 31. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only31 Break the Approval Bottleneck
- 32. BREAK THE APPROVAL BOTTLENECK • Centralize the approval requests © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only32
- 33. BREAK THE APPROVAL BOTTLENECK • Establish approval timeframes © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only33 Supervisor Approval [24 hours] + Executive Approval [24 hours] + Legal Approval [24 hours] EX: 72-hour Approval Window
- 34. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only BREAK THE APPROVAL BOTTLENECK • Automate the approval process 34
- 35. BREAK THE APPROVAL BOTTLENECK • Define done © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only35
- 36. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only36 5. The Justification Game
- 37. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only37 PROVE IT TO ME Prove it to me.
- 38. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only38 Agencies with poor business analysis capability will have three times as many project failures as successes. Billing rates for senior executives decreased as much as $139 per hour for some agency executives between 2011 and 2015.
- 39. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only39 Measure What You Manage
- 40. MEASURE WHAT YOU MANAGE • Uncover productivity improvements © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only40 Planned budget Final cost at completion!
- 41. MEASURE WHAT YOU MANAGE • Improve resource allocation © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only41 Has capacity to help out this week! Need to get contract 2 copywriters for 5 weeks!
- 42. MEASURE WHAT YOU MANAGE • Show alignment with the business © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only42
- 43. MEASURE WHAT YOU MANAGE • Provide cost reporting © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only43
- 44. For a custom demo of Workfront, visit us @ workfront.com/agencies © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only44
- 45. Have more questions after this webinar? Send them to: questions@workfront.com Thank you for joining us today. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only45
- 46. © Workfront 2016 – Proprietary & Confidential Information For Internal Use Only
Editor's Notes
- Too much work, too little time No visibility into who’s working on what Procrastination Miscommunication with clients Low moral, unmotivated team
- Your client has a tight timeline and you need to find a creative resource quickly. But your team of creatives is limited and budgets are tight. How can you get the talent you need and meet your commitment to your client? It’s a fine balancing act to have the right number of resources with the right skill sets available whenever work arrives at the door. As usual, everyone is busy, busy, busy and can’t take on more work. You can outsource, but it’s costly, especially when your creatives are spending their time updating spreadsheets and responding to emails rather than executing creative work. Sometimes your creatives truly are busy on important creative work, but since you don’t know who is working on what or how important the work is, you beg, borrow, and steal your way into the front of the line, with little care for what other work is on your team’s plate. The problem is, you’re not the only one at the agency who needs creative resources now. Others, including some with big titles, are also strategically working their way to the front of the line. It remains to be seen who can plead the most or scream the loudest to get what they want. If you lose out, you’ll have unhappy clients and missed deadlines. If you win, it’s likely someone else will have those same problems. Or maybe you’ll both get what you want, but your creatives will spend their nights and weekends working to deliver everything for everyone.
- Choose one system – online form, email alias, marketing work management tool to accept and manage requests At Rockfish, we use a mix of marketing work management tool and email alias Stick to it! For planned AND ad-hoc requests. If requests are not submitted correctly, work doesn’t get assigned or completed The biggest struggle is getting urgent/hot ad-hoc requests to follow the same process. Requestors and department managers need to understand the “why” and believe in the process
- Designate one person as a traffic manager to assign the work (this may be one person for each department OR traffic “team” if the organization is large enough). This person should have a real-time understanding of current workload as well as employee strengths/weaknesses in order to make effective assignments. Bottom line – Traffic determines who works on what and when. The project team member should NOT have to waste critical time determining this. They should be free to do the previously assigned work and meet their current commitments.
- Traffic and department managers should understand resource capacity as real-time as possible. Use a spreadsheet or online status tracking tool – but try to make it something that the project team has access to and can update real-time. While we would all like to plan out as far as possible, sometimes the nature of the work does not allow us to do this. If resource/capacity planning is new for you, start by planning 1 – 2 weeks out. Develop a cadence of weekly traffic planning such as… TUESDAYS: Account managers and project managers should convey all resource needs for upcoming 1 – 2 weeks for their projects to traffic (on spreadsheet, tool, etc…) WEDNESDAYS: Traffic compiles the information and looks at total allocation by employee (flagging those who are drastically over a 40-hour week) THURSDAYS: Traffic discusses any questions/issues with account managers, project managers, or department managers as needed to plan the upcoming weeks FRIDAYS: Finalized assignments submitted to all
- Your client has a tight timeline and you need to find a creative resource quickly. But your team of creatives is limited and budgets are tight. How can you get the talent you need and meet your commitment to your client? It’s a fine balancing act to have the right number of resources with the right skill sets available whenever work arrives at the door. As usual, everyone is busy, busy, busy and can’t take on more work. You can outsource, but it’s costly, especially when your creatives are spending their time updating spreadsheets and responding to emails rather than executing creative work. Sometimes your creatives truly are busy on important creative work, but since you don’t know who is working on what or how important the work is, you beg, borrow, and steal your way into the front of the line, with little care for what other work is on your team’s plate. The problem is, you’re not the only one at the agency who needs creative resources now. Others, including some with big titles, are also strategically working their way to the front of the line. It remains to be seen who can plead the most or scream the loudest to get what they want. If you lose out, you’ll have unhappy clients and missed deadlines. If you win, it’s likely someone else will have those same problems. Or maybe you’ll both get what you want, but your creatives will spend their nights and weekends working to deliver everything for everyone.
- Remember to keep NEW work requests for the current week to a minimum – with Traffic making the call on whether or not a reprioritization is required. Automate review/approval processes as much as possible (EX: Have account managers provide consolidated feedback as comments in a PDF or online tool vs. having the creative try to comprehend scribble or compare feedback from 5 different emails to figure out what’s really needed) Make time-sheets as easy as possible. If you can pre-populate a time-sheet for them or provide a way for them to report time easily through-out the day, this could give them as much as 30 minutes a day back! If possible, provide a space where team members can collaborate together without having to “book” a conference room.
- Make sure team members know what their priorities are for the current work week at the very least! If you’ve developed a weekly traffic planning cadence, this is just a matter of providing the information BACK to the employees so there is a hand-check between the “planners” and the “doers”. Employees also need to understand the value of the process and should route any new requests made directly to them back to traffic to address.
- Consider placing a priority indicator on any new requests – low, medium, high for example. It’s also important to know anticipated resource needs, LOE, and due date. The traffic manager should take this all into consideration before tampering with current week assignments. Plus, it allows them to plan further into the future.
- Traffic should ensure that 100% capacity is LESS than a 40-hour week to accommodate the inevitable internal tasks or urgent/ad-hoc requests. Internal tasks could include time-tracking, departmental meetings, company-wide training, etc… Ad-hoc requests that cannot wait for a future work are also highly likely. It’s advisable that you leave a little padding for any “quick hits” to keep the account/project managers happy WITHOUT forcing the team into a 50-hour work week.
- Everyone at the agency is always busy, but what they’re all busy doing is often a mystery. Solving the mystery requires communicating who’s doing what, where, and when, but it’s not easy to do when communication and collaboration systems aren’t working. Your boss is waiting for your weekly status report. But getting status updates from everyone is like herding cats. You’ve tried sending email, asking for updates you’ll either never get or that will change before the day’s end. You’ve also tried holding standing meetings that key people miss due to conflicts or that end up interrupting critical work time. Again, you get incomplete and often inaccurate answers that you then have to go back and enter into a spreadsheet and email up the chain. You really don’t have a good handle on what anyone is doing at any given moment, so you struggle to inform downstream resources when work will be coming their way. And, when your boss asks about getting resources for a new project, you have a hard time knowing when anyone really might be available.
- People are inundated with a variety of communication methods – email, online tools, instant messenger, meetings, hallway conversations, etc… Try to establish ONE source for project-related communication. Then standardize WHAT you need to communicate, to WHO, and WHEN. Your communications could be based around certain criteria (you have a question or have something for the team to review) or a specific frequency (provide status update at EOD each day).
- Think about methods that allow project team members to easily make status updates… but ALSO allow managers/reviewers to see the status quickly/easily. If you are looking at an online tool, consider a tool that employs automated Outlook notifications.
- Always consider your audience! If the communication/content you are sharing is NOT being read/understood, then your communication in INEFFECTIVE. The same information may need to be presented in several ways. If you have an Excel document, this could mean a pivot table for each audience showing them the pieces of data important to them. If you have an online tool, this could mean creating views or dashboards based on user login. EX: Client View: Project timeline including what’s been completed, what’s in progress/due next, and what’s upcoming. Overall project budget vs. what has been burned. Executive View: Traffic light report (red/yellow/green) for budget and project progress with explanation of any RED/issues.
- Status updates are part of an internal task and could require a departmental or traffic meeting for planning future weeks.
- Working on marketing initiatives can be a series of starts and stops. But, because the accuracy of the message is so critical, there are several approval steps along the way. Unfortunately, this often means having to hunt down approvers to try and meet deadlines. Just about everything that goes through an agency needs to be approved by someone, from project plans and budgets to creative content and graphics. Client satisfaction is crucial to keeping and winning more business, so getting things right is essential. The approver list often consists of multiple people including senior management, legal, and your clients—people who are so busy they can hardly keep up with their own tasks, let alone your approvals. You try emailing the documents you need approved, but you get no response. Even when you do get approvals back, there is often confusion as to which version is most current or there’s conflicting feedback from two different approvers, and your team is left wondering which feedback to follow. This process leads to more phone calls, emails, and running around to sort things out. No doubt about it. Tracking down and getting approvals is no easy task. It takes time, which can translate into high internal resource costs and rush fees. The alternative—skipping approvals—can create legal and financial risks.
- Identify who needs to approve at each stage Make sure those team members understand the process and when their approval is required Make sure those team members understand how to provide feedback/approval and to whom! Using an automated routing tool for various types of approvals is ideal. If the individual has access to a dashboard with “items for approval”, even better!
- Make sure every approval request allows for routing to ALL necessary approvers. Think about if approvers can review simultaneously or if an approval chain needs to be established.
- Define a file naming convention or location for “FINAL” documents. In our organization, we utilize date and additional designations for same-day revisions. All documents are stored in one, specified folder and sorted by update date so you can be sure you always have the latest and greatest document. Another tip would be to PDF the presentation or document that’s sent to the client so there is not doubt what content was submitted (you could label “ClientRnd1”, etc…).
- If your agency’s budget seems tighter than ever, it’s probably because it is. In its recently released 2015 Labor Billing Rate Survey Report, 4A’s findings show billing rates for senior executives decreased as much as $139 per hour for some agency executives between 2011 and 2015. To get more resources or budget, you’re going to have to do more than just say you need it; you’re going to have to prove it. The pipeline for agency deliverables is non-stop. You need more dollars, time, and resources. But, it’s nearly impossible to support your request without hard metrics to back it up. Management wants to know how many resources you need and how much cost those resources will add to the deliverable. They need to know how adding resources might shorten the timeline. Executives wonder if you’ve squeezed the turnip enough to make your processes as efficient as possible. And if you don’t figure out a way to prove it soon and get the help you need, you’re likely going to miss deadlines, burn out your talent, and have unhappy clients.
- Having a consistent and single source of truth for project timeline and budget vs. actuals gives you a valuable learning tool. You can hone your estimates and timelines and ensure best possible margins.
- Seeing real-time capacity allows you to plan ahead and utilize all resources to their max. No waste. Client deadlines are met.
- Transparent budgets (planned and actuals) allows leadership to see progress at any point. It allows you to show off success or work on learnings for the future.
- Working on marketing initiatives can be a series of starts and stops. But, because the accuracy of the message is so critical, there are several approval steps along the way. Unfortunately, this often means having to hunt down approvers to try and meet deadlines. Just about everything that goes through an agency needs to be approved by someone, from project plans and budgets to creative content and graphics. Client satisfaction is crucial to keeping and winning more business, so getting things right is essential. The approver list often consists of multiple people including senior management, legal, and your clients—people who are so busy they can hardly keep up with their own tasks, let alone your approvals. You try emailing the documents you need approved, but you get no response. Even when you do get approvals back, there is often confusion as to which version is most current or there’s conflicting feedback from two different approvers, and your team is left wondering which feedback to follow. This process leads to more phone calls, emails, and running around to sort things out. No doubt about it. Tracking down and getting approvals is no easy task. It takes time, which can translate into high internal resource costs and rush fees. The alternative—skipping approvals—can create legal and financial risks.