20 Creative Agency Experts Share Their Project Management Secrets

How do successful creative agencies manage their projects? What steps do they take to onboard clients? What are some best practices they use across all clients and projects?

These are essential questions for running a successful agency. It doesn’t matter whether you’re running a marketing agency or a creative PR firm; you need solid processes and best practices to scale your business.

To find out answers to these questions, we decided to ask some of our favorite creative agencies about their project management secrets.

After dozens of emails, we gathered feedback from 20 different creative agencies.

This is what these 20 experts had to say about their creative project management best practices.

The Importance of Onboarding

As we’ve said in these pages before, client onboarding is one of the most important aspects of creative project management.

Our experts agreed; this is what they had to say about onboarding:

Takeaway: For long-term agency success, it’s more important to give clients what they need, not what you can sell them. Sometimes, this might even mean sacrificing short-term projects.

The question now is: what should you cover in your onboarding meeting?

Here’s some insight from OHPartners:

Takeaway: Successful onboarding depends on a free and transparent exchange of information. Clients should be able to ask you anything, and vice versa. Your entire team across departments should know exactly what the client’s business does and how it operates.

What should be your approach to client onboarding?

Here’s insight from Gordon Seirup.

The avoid surprises principle echoes Matt’s focus on learning as much as possible about the client’s business in the onboarding process. Similarly, clients should also not have any surprises about how you work and what you’ll deliver.

While you’re learning about the client’s business, it is also important to negotiate enough room for creative maneuvering. Locking yourself into a particular solution in a project’s early stages is neither efficient nor effective. Allow your team enough space to express themselves creatively.

Run Better Kickoff Meetings

Further on, our agency experts emphasized the importance of kickoff meetings during onboarding.

Here’s what they had to say:

Takeaway: Besides getting clients on the same page, it is also important to align your own departments at the kickoff meeting. For a successful business, your sales and management team should be in sync.

Use the kickoff meeting to ensure that your account managers and project managers are well-aligned to capture future opportunities.

Kickoff meetings aren’t just for clients alone. It’s also a good idea to have a kickoff meeting for your own team, as Angela Harless points out.

Takeaway: Gather your entire team responsible for a project and establish your internal milestones, goals, and workflow. This will improve collaboration and help bring everyone on the same page.

At the end of a successful kickoff meeting, you should have all the data you need to create a marketing blueprint.

This will tell you what you need to deliver, and when, as Andrew Gray says.

Takeaway: Collect all the information you can about your clients and their customers, then organize it into a short 'blueprint'. Refer to this blueprint when setting timelines, goals, and deliverables.

Develop Processes for Everything

Successful agencies are almost always fanatical about their process. They have detailed methods for gathering data, delegating tasks, and managing deliverables.

Usually, this process is customized for each client, as Matthieu Mingasson of Code&Theory says:

Takeaway: Client requirements vary; your processes will have to vary with them. This is particularly true for disruptive digital products where the impact of your work can be felt across the organization.

Ergo, as Matthieu says, “Design the process before you design the product”.

One process that Josh Wood of RuckusMarketing uses effectively is client-agency workshops, as he expands below:

Takeaway: Develop a process that involves clients in every stage of the product development. This means you have constant feedback and don’t spring any surprises on the client (or the client springing surprises on you). One way to do that is through regular agency-client workshops.

Joe Smith of UsTwo espouses a similar philosophy:

Takeaway: Adopt an Agile approach where you share more of your work upfront and gather feedback. This will help you avoid wasting resources on designs and approaches that don’t work.

A process tells you the steps for managing a project. A framework, on the other hand, tells you how to create a process that works.

Here’s what Pete Sena has to say about frameworks and flexibility:

Understand Your Clients (and Their Customers)

The importance of customer research can’t be understated, especially in a service-focused industry like creative agencies.

Here are some insights about client research from the experts we interviewed:

Takeaway: Don’t limit your research to just your clients. Research your client’s customers as well (who might even be the client’s employees in case of internal projects). After all, these are your end users; the client is just a conduit to reach them.http://www.accudata.com/

Understanding your clients will help you set better goals. And when you reach those goals, you get results you can showcase to win future clients, as Karen Blanchard points out:

Takeaway: Focus on the end result your clients want to see, and work to deliver on that goal. This end result should be your ‘one metric that matters’.

On the subject of understanding clients, here’s what the leading visual communication design agency, KillerInfographics, has to say:

Takeaway: Work with the client to understand their goals, then create a custom solution that can help them meet these goals.

When it comes to understanding clients, a recurring theme in the responses we received was empathy.

Empathy doesn’t just describe a way to understand clients; it describes a philosophy that guides your entire business. Successful agencies empathize with a client’s problems, concerns, and challenges.

Here’s what Blake Howard of Matchstic has to say about empathy:

Takeaway: Practiced empathy involves listening to the client and forging long-term relationships. It means to manage your own ego and truly understand the client’s concerns. Only once you can understand the client can you make the client understand your own approach and solutions.

Speaking of empathy, here’s Pete Sena’s take on it:

Takeaway: Agencies are service providers, and like all service providers, they need to empathize with their customers and understand their pain points to be effective.

Communication and Collaboration are Key

Project communication and collaboration, it goes without saying, are vital parts for agency success. So much of success depends on how well you can work and communicate with others (and your own team).

Here’s what our experts had to say about communication and collaboration:

Takeaway: Communication and collaboration should be core values for your agency. Make it a part of your workspace, your onboarding, and your hiring requirements.

Great agencies not only communicate well with clients, but they also communicate well within the organization. This often means giving space to creative individuals to communicate in a manner and role that fits their personality, as James Kramer points out:

Takeaway: Don’t force creative people to fit a role. Instead, create roles that fit their personalities. For this, you’ll have to communicate clearly with your own team members and understand how they work.

The final insight on communication and collaboration comes from Pete Sena:

Takeaway: Communication and collaboration should always be people-focused, not process-focused. Change your processes to fit your people, not the other way around.