Managing workload as an agency is absolutely crucial, especially when working on a large variety of clients and different projects at any one time.
So how do you make sure you’re prioritising the correct projects, making sure you’re meeting service requirements for clients and meeting deadlines?
If you like, you can do this the traditional way, such as having a ‘Status’ Excel spreadsheet detailing all tasks that need to be completed, with a traffic light system of the status of work, details of deadlines etc. This can either be done on an individual basis or in a master document, where you may have a tab detailing all work being undertaken with tabs for each individual staff member. A couple of our team members have worked this way at previous marketing agencies.
We create something similar for each of our clients. This is not necessarily for managing our workload, but more so that they know what we are working on for them at any one time. We call these traffic light reports and they detail who the task is waiting on and focuses for the next quarter.
At Tao Digital we love to use ClickUp, one of the most popular project management tools on the market right now. All tasks within client’s traffic light reports are added within ClickUp, and we can view the status of the tasks, the time tracked, who is assigned to them, subtasks, create automations, etc.
We love using project management software and it definitely does what it says on the tin, saving us a day a week. You can read our full review of the software here for more information.
There are also many other project management tools that we’ve heard other agencies have huge success with - Monday, Trello and Asana being the other major three. Each one has different features, usability, price points etc. We’d highly recommend project management software for anyone, but especially agencies as there can be many different clients!
Along with the above we also hold a daily morning meeting where the team discusses what they are working on for the day and can raise any questions. This ensures we are prioritising the right projects day to day and is especially helpful when working from home and the team is unable to bounce questions off each other as easily, or ideas that can’t be communicated over Slack as easily.
Overall, it’s important to ensure your organisation is top notch within your agency. Communication is key and ensuring work is done on time and to budget is of paramount importance.
