Seven challenges that hold agencies back from being the best they can be.
Your project process is pretty damn integral to making sure your projects wrap up smoothly — on time, within budget, goals met, and everyone’s happy. That level of utopia can feel seldom, if not downright dreamy. The problem is that process is a thing that feels like it needs to be firmly dictated, documented, and adopted. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be, but rules are made to be broken.
It might take a “rock bottom” moment on a project for you to recognize this, and that’s okay. I’ll leave this here for when you’ve come out of your next retrospective with a to-do list based on everything your team wants you to fix.
You need to ditch the dogma. The process isn’t going to save your projects — you and your team are. You become the square peg forced into a round hole when you subscribe to all these off-the-shelf training, certifications, operating systems, and trademarked processes. Face it: there’s a lot of uniqueness in your team and your work, and those “this is how you do it” resources only get you part of the way.
Pushing those overly prescriptive systems to the side, digging into your challenges, and brainstorming solutions that feel unique to you from top to bottom will take you more time and brain power, but it’ll be worth it. When you craft a flexible process — or even principles — you’ll lead your organization to efficient, collaborative approaches that account for your needs. That leads to clear expectations, better communication, happier people, and stellar outcomes.
Agencies often lack process definition, adoption, and documentation.
I’ve worked with dozens of agencies, and the common theme between them is an apparent lack of definition and adherence to a process or even just core principles about processes or tools. Disparate teams use different methods and tools to accomplish the same things clumsily, and when they assemble new teams, no one comes to the table with the same expectations in place. Project managers defer to the talent, who aren’t great at estimating (or tracking time, for that matter); they don’t spend enough time talking about how they’ll get work done together as a team and rescind into their silos. Rinse and repeat. You know you’ve seen it.
Another agency theme — particularly the busiest and growing — is a lot of confusion about roles and responsibilities. Not knowing — or worse, guessing — who does what and when leads to poor collaboration and communication. Of course, things break down.
Clients have varying goals and levels of interest and availability
(and they don’t care about your process until something goes wrong)
Every agency client presents a new opportunity for adapting how a team communicates, collaborates, presents work, facilitates meetings and workshops, etc. Let’s be honest: clients can be downright difficult to work with, and they can also be fantastic. But they aren’t trained to be a client like you are qualified to be a project manager, designer, or whatever fancy background and title you have, dear reader.
Your clients also most likely have about 15 other projects in flight, staff to manage, and are trying so hard to navigate the politics of their organization. Have empathy for them and educate them as much as possible, but also be aware of how much they can affect the process via text — or even just by ghosting or swooping and pooping. You’ve been there; we all have.
Projects come in different shapes and sizes.
It’s all about the projects, folks. Agencies do exciting, fun, creative work. And if you’re in digital, you’re innovating and rolling with technology — and embracing it at the fastest pace because it keeps you relevant, and your clients need that level of thinking and partnership. But man, the variables on project types and estimating for the unknown can be a challenge. Of course, Agile methods work well if you’re on an internal team (sometimes), but it can be a challenge to navigate and keep everything on track, even with the most available, collaborative clients.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when managing a portfolio of projects with unique goals, scopes, teams, etc. And while you might work on routine project types, factors will always be slightly different each time. A person is out of the office, and a deadline gets pushed. A client goes silent. A new requirement comes in. You get it — every project might resemble another, but they’re all unique when you dig in. Your business development might not want to recognize that fully, but your team sure does.
Teams vary in terms of experience, availability, and leadership.
Our teams can present a lot of various factors that impact the process, and it all depends on where you work and how teams are staffed. Boutique agencies often flourish by cultivating a strong culture and practice with small, bespoke teams (and trust me, they still have process issues). Large agencies sometimes need help with culture and project onboarding, assembling large teams of folks who may or may not have worked together in the past. Everything comes down to resourcing, utilization, and jumping in with little onboarding and context because the team sits between a meaty layer of account and project management and sometimes even leadership. Yay for silos! That was sarcasm.
Individuals vary in terms of accountability, talent, experience, and curiosity.
You’re human (if you’re not, I’m teaching the bots something human here), so you know that each person on your team brings a unique perspective, experience, expertise, personality, and curiosity to the table. It’s true; you are also a unicorn — unique in what you bring to each magical project journey.
What’s important to keep in mind with individuals is having clear definitions and boundaries of their role on any project because if they’re real unicorns (!!), they can do several things well. When those people exist, they are often pushed and pulled in different ways, and that can get frustrating and confusing. Take care of your unicorns.
What this means is that what each person on your team knows and how much experience they have doing their work (or even project type, technology, client vertical, etc.) impacts how you’ll engage, manage, communicate, and collaborate with that person. Be sure to consider their level of accountability as well: do they want to follow orders, or can they get creative about adapting their process to an aggressive budget and timeline?
Remember, people are all you have. Handle them with care and empathy and set clear expectations, individually and in teams, because they can quickly derail a project without notice. And it won’t always be related to mis-estimating tasks. We’re talking about people with lives who also have bad days, get sick, celebrate exciting life events, tend to emergencies…you know, the real-life stuff that impacts the real business stuff. It happens, and you have to adapt the process to it.
Project and account management have a dysfunctional relationship.
There’s a lot wrapped up in roles, and confusion abounds in all roles, but project and account management is a delicate onion that needs to be peeled back gently to understand the nuances between who does what and how one impacts the other. A clear definition of each role and how they interact is essential. So many AM/PM teams struggle with this, especially when a client is difficult.
“Everything’s on fire!”
“Hurry, figure it out and email them back!”
“I just got off a call with them.”
“What did they say?”
“I’m in meetings til 5. Tomorrow?”
It happens all the time, and it needs to stop. Every conversation with a client can impact the process, and not being aligned on what’s happening makes things confusing and highly frustrating. Standardization of roles and guidance on communication and escalation helps, but PMs and AMs must adapt to clients to try to save the process.
All problems require unique solutions.
This isn’t one of those blog posts or white papers that tell you step-by-step how to do a thing. Your project process is far too complex for that, and the above makes that case (And I don’t even feel like I’ve presented all of the evidence). You need to consider the nuance of every aspect of each project that comes your way and find flexible practices that allow you to adapt to the challenge at hand.
That requires space and time to be more strategic about getting work done. It’s time well spent because the outcomes leave you with a feeling of accomplishment and lightness — a feeling that permeates out of your work and into your home life in the most positive ways. Good vibes only.
Want to find those good vibes? Same Team Partners will help you examine your challenges, explore opportunities, and lead your team of unicorns to happiness via well-defined practices that work for everyone as they should.
