3 Ways In-House Teams Can Benefit From Agency Management Software

At this point, most creative agencies have adopted some sort of agency project management software. Gone are the days of walking down the hall to figure out what a designer is working on. Agencies have become substantially more efficient and therefore are able to balance larger workloads with less staff. However, there’s one type of creative agency that seems to be lagging behind – in-house teams.

In-house creative teams of larger organizations can benefit from agency-specific project management software just as much as traditional external agencies. Here are 3 ways that your in-house team can benefit from agency management software:

Better Client Collaboration

With the right program in place, your creative department will be able to store and organize all files, communications, and reports that both you and your clients rely on. You won’t have to worry about tracking down attachments in emails anymore. You will be able to upload files into specific job folders and know that your client in the other department will have instant access to those files. If your client wants to comment on a job, they’ll be able to do that in the program which will notify you to take a look. With all files, communications, and reports in one location, collaborating with your client becomes much easier.

Clearly Defined Scope of Work

One thing I hear a lot from staff at internal agencies is that their departmental clients can be very indecisive about the work being done. Since there is often no bill associated with the work, clients feel free to request changes, adjust the scope of projects and add additional deliverables knowing that there are no financial consequences.

Agency management software can assist with this by providing request functionality. If you are able to build a creative brief that can be filled out online by the client in the form of a work request, you will have more control over the work that is requested of you. You will be able to specify in the brief exactly what can and cannot be included in each type of project. Even if clients asking for additional changes is unavoidable, asking the right questions at the start can help you to be better prepared.

Demonstrating Value

Since many internal agencies do not bill their departmental clients, those clients often have no idea what the value of the work being done by the agency is. Over time, this can cause a lot of problems. It’s important for staff within agency to feel like their clients understand the value of their work. Agency management software can really help with this.

Even if you are not billing your departmental client, you may still want to provide them with reports that show what the value is of the work you have provided. Researching the rates of local agencies can help you to setup rates that are average for the services you provide. Tracking this without agency management software would be a lot of work and that probably the main reason why many internal agencies do not. However, with agency management software in place, it is much easier to track the value of the work being done and therefore provide reports to your clients that demonstrate this value. After all, if the project you just finished would have cost $50K if it was done by the agency down the street, everyone should be aware of that.

Check out how the FP Marketing Team uses Function Point to track requests, project progress, deadlines, and costs.