How to Ensure Everyone is on Track at Your Creative Agency

Keep Everyone on Track at Your Creative Agency

In a creative agency, it is very important for all the team members to be on the same page. So how do you ensure everyone is on track? Well, there a few things that an agency can do to ensure that everyone is on the same page. In this blog, I will discuss a few steps a creative agency can take. To briefly list a few options:

1. Have a Project Management System

One way, if not the best way to ensure every team member is on track is to have a project management system. One like Function Point, that gives you the ability to track time against jobs, build schedules, estimates, invoices and manage your clients. If you are able to create a schedule and assign work to each team member than you are able to ensure that each team member is on track. As you can track their progress, and see how many hours have been put towards a specific job or project. If a team member is unsure what is next, then they are able to check in the system and see how far along each project is and what work has been assigned to them. This keeps everything organized and ensure each team member is on track and working hard.

2. Utilize Email Integration

Email integration falls in with the project management system. It is extremely useful as all communication both internally and externally can be documented and posted to the client’s profile. That way each team member involved in the project is able to see all correspondence between the clients and within the team as well. This makes it so everyone is aware what the client is looking for and how the project should be completed. It keeps all employees on track and in the loop, that way nobody has an excuse for not knowing what’s going on.

3. Communicate Every Step of the Way

Having communication in every step of the workflow may seem obvious, however, you would be surprised how many times it’s not done. With a lack of communication, one team member may go a step too far and be forced to backtrack as the work that was done does not coincide with the other parts of that project. If a team works together and everyone is on the same page, then as you move forward with a project, there will be no reason to backtrack as each part of the project will fit together to produce the final product.

4. Have a Hand-Off System

Handing off work to your colleagues can be tricky. You want to make sure that your team has something to work on, but at the same time, you do not want to pile too much onto one person. That being said, how do you hand off work to colleagues in the most effective way? Well, start off by knowing who is working on what and how much longer they have on that project. However you do it (we suggest using a project management software to save time) it’s important to know what each team member is doing at any given time. Once you know this information it becomes very simple to hand off work to your colleagues. The more organized you are, the easier it is to see your progress and the easier it is to delegate tasks.

The best thing you can do for your agency to ensure everyone is on track is to have a project management system. A system like this keeps your agency organized, and keeps all team members in the loop when it comes to what work needs to be done and when to have it done by. The last thing you want is to miss a deadline or have to backtrack because one team member jumped the gun. A project management system should also have email integration as that will keep all communication internally and externally in one convenient place for all team members to access. Lastly, communicate with each other and help each other. Without communication, your agency will be a mad house with no direction.

This article was written by former Function Point employee, Erik Ivker