Internal Agency Issues Solved By Project Management Software

Internal Agency Issues Solved By Project Management Software

Many creative project management software solutions out there right now are tailored towards solving challenges met by traditional agencies. What if, however, you work for an internal agency that faces many challenges that traditional agencies often don’t come up against?

At Function Point, our experience with this type of agency has given us some specialized knowledge about the world of project management software and internal agencies. To help you navigate the choppy waters, let’s explore some of the challenges that internal agencies face and a few ways to solve them:

Managing Job Requests

Instead of having customers, internal agencies have various “clients” – other departments, cost centres, offices, and many other variations of this. Each client can submit hundreds, if not thousands of job requests monthly. On top of trying to manage the sheer volume of requests, you have each client submitting requests in their own format. If you’re lucky, it’ll be sent through email, but who can forget that person who interrupts your lunch or shouts at you down the hall to put in a new request that needs to be done, like, yesterday. To add to all the chaos, your manager wants a report on how many jobs each client requests, on a monthly basis.

This is why it’s important to standardize and automate the way you receive job requests. You want to have a job request form or creative briefs where your clients can fill in the details of what you need in order to complete the job. Taking it a step further, a job request portal for them to submit the request automate this process even more. Function Point’s client portal feature will allow you to setup various request forms and automatically track job requests by time and client. The job requests can be routed to the appropriate team member as well!  Your team will eliminate the background noise during lunch, hundreds of email requests, and enjoy doing what you do best – designing!

Reporting

While the internal creative department is happy to accept job requests, it’s easy for clients to become overzealous with the number of requests. This can cause the department to be quickly overworked and depleted of resources. As a result, it’s important to know which clients and which types of jobs are taking up most of your time. By creating the proper reports, you can better communicate your issues to management and clients, and adopt a solution that will minimize the impact on your department. With a project management solution, you can easily track time to jobs and generate reports with the click of a button.

Tracking Deadlines

Managing deadlines is a reality that becomes much more difficult to control when you have hundreds of requests. The clients are also only a few steps away from you, and this can add to your stress as they can ping you more easily. That’s why it’s important to have a tool for managing deadlines and your schedules, all at a glance. Function Point’s creative project management software will help you see job deadlines quickly for the entire team, each individual, or client. You can view them all in a calendar while getting notifications when a job is close to reaching its due date.

These are some common challenges met by internal agencies on a daily basis.  While many project management tools help you manage some challenges, Function Point is one of the few systems that can help you automate job requests, project management, and reporting all in one cloud-based tool.

To find out more about how Function Point’s creative project management software can transform the productivity of your internal agency, book a personalized demo with one of our software experts!