How I Learned the 3 Keys to Fixing Chaotic Agency Project Management (and You Can Too)

All right. And we are live with the first presentation for the day. Let me introduce Jakub. Man, I'm gonna get it someday.

That's good. That's good.

Yeah, People slaughter my name all the time and I feel like it's super easy, so. But he is the content marketing manager at Zen Pilot. Actually, if you guys want a good episode on just like content marketing, go listen to Agency Journey podcast where Kubo was on there talking with Gray. And it was just like. It was actually a very insightful episode for seeing how you guys are approaching content and like, being able to use like, internal team members and how they're thinking about it and promoting their stuff. But through that, you're also, I guess, the host of the First Class Operations, the newsletter from Zen Pilot, which is one of the. There's very few newsletters that I open up continuously when I see them, and that's one of them because it is a great way to stay up to date on agency ops, agency news, and. And know who to go follow on LinkedIn and all of that.

So.

And then you play bass. I feel like. Right. I feel like I should throw that in because you got the pictures everywhere, but.

But yeah.

Welcome. Welcome to the summit. I am going to disappear now, pull up your slides and let you take the reins.

Okay, awesome. Thanks, Chris. That was a lovely intro. Thank you so much for the very nice things you just said. And hello, hello, hello everyone, and welcome to today's presentation. Oh, I'm giving you spoilers already about how I learned the three keys to fixing chaotic agency project management. And you can too. I should be saying probably good morning to most of you all tuning in from the USA here in gloomy, cold European Poland. It's 4pm already. I've been thinking about this all day. And as I like to say, the hard part is over. The wait is over and we can finally get into the All In Agency Summit and into the presentations. By all means, let me know that the comments section is working here for everyone. Let me know that you can see the slides. Hello from Montreal. Love to see it. Let me know. Anybody from Europe here. I'm not counting on Poland, but maybe Europe. Let me know and I'll dive right into the presentation because there's a lot to cover. Let's see about what we've got to present today. I'm here to tell you my story. My story of chaotic agency project management. How I dealt with the chaos and in some cases also created the chaos. If I'm perfectly honest with you, I wanted to start this story by giving you a couple quotes. The quote on the right you can read for yourself. It's from Zeb Evans, the founder and CEO of ClickUp and it's about what Zenpilot does where Cloud ClickUp Solutions Partner I wanted to focus on the quote on the left which is from Jocko Willink, former Navy SEAL Officer, author of Extreme Ownership. Anybody read that, let me know in the comments. I really recommend the book and it really came really really spoke to me as I was preparing this presentation for you today. Let me read it to you. One of the key qualities a leader must possess is the ability to detach from the chaos, mayhem and emotions in a situation and make good clear decisions based on what is actually happening. Now. Why this quote is this is precisely what we will be doing here today. For the next 30 minutes we will be detaching ourselves from the chaos and the mayhem the day to day of your project management system. Taking a step back and trying to look at it with a little more of a clear view, a little more clear headed with fewer emotions. And I hope I'll give you an opportunity here today to take a look at your project management system, whatever it may be, and through the lens of my story and the best practices that Zenpilot teaches and preaches, you'll be able to see the gaps in your own project management system. Hope that makes sense to everyone. Just checking the comments here quickly. Hi Katie. Hey Sean in the UK 3:00pm okay. Yes, awesome, awesome. Okay, let's keep this show going then. So as a brief intro, yes. Hi, I'm Jakub Greizar. My friends call me Kuba so you all can call me Kuba too. I'm here representing Zenpilot as their Content Marketing Manager. Zenpilot very briefly helps agencies build more productive, profitable and healthy teams by streamlining their operations. We do that by helping you take care of the three keys to clarity in your operations. And primarily the tool that we use for that is by helping you build one unified work system on top of ClickUp. We'll talk about ClickUp more in just a second. We have over 2700 happy agency clients and if nothing else, if you really have to dash here, I really recommend that you check out our YouTube channel where we have both a ton of great ClickUp tutorials from our productivity professor Jeff Seifer as well as Chris already mentioned this episodes of Agency Journey, our favorite, the podcast that we create where we interview great agency leaders and sometimes yes, it's one zone pilot person talking to another Zone Pilot person. A lot of it is run by Gray MacKenzie, and you can learn a lot about agency operations in general, not just ClickUp based on that. And finally, I'm just going to let you know right off the bat, there might not be a lot of time left for Q and A for this session. The slides are pretty packed, so if there are any questions, I'll try to grab them along the way. But I invite you to chat me up later on. You can find me on LinkedIn or, or we can find ourselves in the networking section later and talk about anything that piqued your interest. So finally, I like to follow the bottom line upfront approach, so I'm not going to keep you too long in the dark in terms of the three keys. And so leading into the story that I'm about to tell you, it starts with a tool, with a project management tool. That tool is ClickUp. A lot of you probably heard about it. I don't think a lot of you were using it back when my team was using it or back when zenpilot was first starting to experiment with it. But the tool is not everything. You also need to take care of the other two keys, which are the processes and the habits. And only that creates clarity for your organization. Clarity and who does what, how things should be done to get them done the right way every time. And yeah, I mean, this quote here is from somebody who you may recognize. So we'll be diving into the three keys, but first I'm going to tell you the story that I went through, which I think you'll also see a lot of. I think you'll see that there's a lot of stuff there that you'll find familiar and recognizable. Quick check of the chat. Carl Sakis. Hello. Well, okay, you're one of the speakers that makes sense. Hello, Rob, Mia, Wesley. Yes, all good, all good. Great to see you all here. Let's keep moving. So I want to be clear about kind of the words that we're using here. So when you look at the three keys, only when you have the tools, the processes and the habits dialed in, you can talk about having a project management system. So a lot of agencies have a project management tool. You might be currently on Asana, maybe on Trello, Jira, Monday.com, teamwork.com, and you might be on ClickUp, of course, but that doesn't mean that you have a holistic project management system. That is very much part of what I did wrong in my previous journey, which I'll get to in a second. And again, bottom line up front. This is the type of stuff that we'll be talking about here today. Okay. And this is, you know, the, I mean I would say screenshot this, but you'll get the recording. Of course. We'll be talking about, you know, how to set up the hierarchy of your project management tool, again using ClickUp as an example. But this applies to a lot of other project management tools as well. We'll be talking about principles like the processes should live where the work gets done, about daily habits around your usage of your PM tool, about communication within your PM tool, about the sizes of tasks and what we call the one person, one sitting not exceeding four hours rule for subtasks, which probably doesn't mean a lot to you right right now, but I'll explain it along the way and you can see the rest of this here, probably the last bullet here is actually the most important. The role of a PM champion or ClickUp champion is one of the main elements of Looking back on my story of self implementing ClickUp and building a homebrew project management system, that was one of my main mistakes. So my story very briefly, this is you'll recognize this as my current LinkedIn picture, but this is actually a picture that was taken, you know, a few years ago. I look the exact same because I don't age. I'm famously a vampire and I just do marketing to entertain myself in the meantime. So the point in time about which we'll be talking about here is I was working at a software development agency, so that's my previous company and I was leading a small marketing team. I think we were hitting just three, four people at that point. And in terms of project management, not even a system, but in terms of the tooling we were tracking our tasks in Wunderlist. I want to ask the chat, I know there's a little bit of a delay, but please comments let me know who remembers Wunderlist, okay, because that's been sunsetted now. I think Microsoft bought them out. I think it got rolled into Microsoft Tasks somehow. But anyway, the reality was we had these one on one list of tasks. So me and my direct manager had one, me and my direct reports had one. But there was no common system. Like there was no visibility into who was doing what, not to mention due dates, commitments, capacity, nothing of that sort. So we really needed a new project management tool. Checking the comments quickly for Wunderlist fans, maybe it's already too far in the past. So what we were looking for in our tool Is we really needed to answer certain project management questions. As I look at this list with you here right now, I want you to look at these questions and not just ask yourself if your current project management system is answering these questions. But also I would love to know in the chat which of these questions you're the most unclear on right now. The way you're tracking work at your agency right now, which of these right now is the most lacking? So we needed to find answers to questions like who's working on what the basics, when will a certain deliverable be delivered by when? Exactly. Right. That's important to know. What are the priorities? This is one of the main needs of individual contributors. And you do need to be thinking about kind of the various roles that will be interacting with your project management system. A team lead versus a manager, you know, higher level versus an individual contributor are going to have different needs. We have a lot of good content on that on the zenpilot website and Jeff Seifer, our productivity professor, has shared about that on LinkedIn just recently. Another need is what got done. For example, in our case, because we were an in house marketing team, we needed to report upstream the deliverables, the output of the marketing team. You probably all know the story of defending the output that the marketing team delivered. We needed to have a place where we had updates on our projects. We definitely needed to know very clearly about blockers. So we needed a project management system, a project management tool that we could communicate within. We needed to know who does or doesn't have capacity. That's a key question in the agency world, of course. And also this one is, you know, very kind of, this is connected to my particular role. At the time I was a team lead of a content team. So what I really needed to know is what projects are in flight that I will be blocking if I don't set aside time to, for example, review a blog post. Right. So I might be thinking that my Wednesday is wide open. But without a proper project management system, I couldn't see that on Wednesday, three first drafts of blog posts were due to land on my desk for my review. And if I don't review them promptly, then I'm adding one day, two day, three days to the whole timeline of that blog post being delivered. So quick check of the chat here. Okay. Nothing coming that I can see. Moving on then. So the next chapter of the story is we discovered ClickUp. Now I wonder, I mean I really, I realized that a lot of you probably know about ClickUp, have heard about it, you know, they've done some really good marketing over the last few years. That was not the case when I met ClickUp. They were doing some smart SEO and that's how they, they got me in the first place. But first of all, chat, do let me know if you're familiar with ClickUp. Okay, leave me a comment if that's the case. My ClickUp, the ClickUp that I first fell in love with, and it's only been growing and expanding its functionalities ever since. I became enamored with it because it had some very cool features right off the bat. So what I really needed was the same list of tasks to be able to express them as a list of tasks or as a board think kind of like Trello or on a calendar view, and you could switch between those as well. ClickUp Supported Multiple Assignees, ClickUp Supported Subtasks and checklists, and both of those can be useful at various points in time. And they supported the ability to create custom views. So that's kind of the key feature of ClickUp is that you can take the same database of tasks, but you can show just the closed tasks, just the tasks that were assigned to a certain person, just the tasks that were, I don't know, completed last week by the design department and they had a particular tag. ClickUp can do all of that, and that's part of what makes it super powerful and super flexible. So, see, thinking back to the three keys, the funny thing about my situation was when it came to the tool, I basically landed on one that could do it all. The answer to can it be done in ClickUp was usually yes. We just had to find a good way to do it. And also, I have to admit, the free plan on ClickUp that we initially landed on was pretty generous. That helped us make the decision too. So happy emotions all around. We moved all our work to ClickUp. People were blown away by the tool. And, you know, this is definitely something that you can relate to. You know, when you either start fresh with a new system or, you know, you implement a project management system for the first time, there's this blank slate, there's this fresh start and it results in this big excitement. You know, this is the moment when we'll get things done right. This time it'll all work out. But actually, I didn't know what I was getting myself into because there's a lot more that comes into building a well designed project management system. And I did not know at that time anything about designing project management systems. That was part of the problem so now I'm going to take a detour from my story and talk about the project management challenges of agencies in general. And recently I happened upon something in the Zenpilot database that I was really happy to find. This is from the intakes that we were taking in from our zenpilot clients. There was this question there. What are your top challenges when it comes to project management? I was super excited to find this, of course, because it shed just a lot of light on the challenges that they were facing. I realized as well that there was just a lot of matching scenarios there between what I was facing leading an in house marketing team and what agencies are facing when it comes to their project management challenges. To quickly go through them and kind of to shed some light on them. Being able to prioritize among all tasks is a big one. The second bullet already lets us know that the tool is not enough. When people end up saying assigning tasks to other team members, it often gets lost. So it is obvious, but it bears saying that it's not enough to just have a system and assign work to somebody. You also need to make sure that this actually gets executed. Holding employees accountable is another, another big one that gets mentioned here. And the problem that I really sympathize with is each project management does something differently within their tasks. So there's some detail here, right? They're using tasks. One project management might be using the tasks feature for something. Another might be using subtasks. Another might be using lists. Another might be using checklists. Tools like ClickUp and many others offer a lot of flexibility. But that's part of the problem. That's part of the issue here. There's decision paralysis about where to put things. And then another scenario that's an anti pattern is when project management tends to fall to each individual teammate. And do let me know if any of this kind of sounds familiar rings a bell is relatable to you. Definitely. We had to deal with that at my previous company. Within my story then there were process problems. One problem was just having documented processes in general. But then another person already said that people didn't follow processes. There were processes, detailed SOPs, but they weren't being followed. Then project statuses were another issue. And here going into the minutiae of ClickUp for just a second, ClickUp does offer custom statuses. So for each workflow a given task can have different sets of statuses. And actually that's one of the common traps to use too many custom statuses. But I didn't know that at the Time. And then finally the holy grail is at the end there. Knowing which team members have bandwidth right for an agency, that's the difference between confidently taking on a new client versus not knowing whether we can do so, whether we'll overburden the team. So being hesitant to take on new business. And this really maps to the mistakes that I made. And a lot of those can be boiled down to lack of discipline, to lack of follow through and not really having. Of the three keys, processes, tools and habits, it's really the habits piece that fell apart the most in my case and we've seen falls apart the most in the case of the agencies that we worked with. There's some guidelines, there is a tool that can do the job, there's some documentation on how to use it, but there isn't really a level of accountability and responsibility for making that tool work for everyone. For all the different roles, the way the tool is used is not uniform enough. And so that creates confusion and chaos. The reason we never properly addressed our issues is in the case of my previous companies, is because I never learned the best practices. This was a case of me trying to go kind of the DIY route, trying to learn things on my own. And that's all well and good and I'm glad I went through this journey. But looking back on it, I mean I thought self implementing ClickUp at my previous company was a success story really. And you know, I had good feedback. People were saying, I mean to my face politely, that they got a lot of value out of it. Knowing now what project management can look like when you really do it right, I realized that I didn't implement the best practices, I didn't know them, I didn't even actively enough seek them out. And because of that I created confusion for my team. I slowed projects down, I created anti patterns like we had this weekly meeting during which ClickUp was updated, but unfortunately that really incentivized people to update our system just on Monday on that one meeting and then for the rest of the week the system went into disarray. And because I was learning by doing constantly making changes of what's a subtask, what's a task, I eroded trust in the system. This is definitely something like I can bet this is something that you're seeing in your organizations as well. If you're self implementing that you have to make changes to how the system runs. But every time you make such a change, you have to retrain the team and they just end up asking themselves is this going to be the last change? Are we going to end up doing things differently in a week or month's time? And this might seem like a detail of agency life, but looking at my team, I'm not going to say that there wasn't some measure of success in how we implemented our project management system. But because of my mistakes, really, my team members career record is not as good as it might have been. Project timelines got extended when they didn't have to be, there was lack of clarity in the briefs when there didn't have to be. The way we implemented statuses created confusion, etc. Etc. So this is what's at stake here and this is why it's worth spending some time to implement a real effective project management system. This all changed when I met Gray MacKenzie, ZenPilot co founder in 2021. Ultimately, I joined ZenPilot in 2023, almost to the day a year ago. My start date was March 1st and I'm here to tell you about how to actually do project management properly at your agency. And it again brings us back to the three keys. The tools, the habits and the processes. And now I'm going to give you some really quick pointers and point you to some resources from ZenPilot on how to take care of all the three keys so you can finally achieve clarity for everyone on all the work that you are doing. And I'm gonna have to go fast here because I only have nine minutes left. So pardon me here, checking the chat just one extra time. So it's not possible to explain everything in just nine, 10 minutes here. But for starters, if you have a system like ClickUp, if you're on ClickUp or a similar system, there's a recommended hierarchy that we have again, that I didn't know about, that you now know about. And the Hierarchy starts with 34 main spaces. Spaces are like the biggest bucket that you can have for tasks within ClickUp. Under spaces you can have folders, then lists, then tasks and subtasks, et cetera. So create a space for growth, sales and marketing. Create a space for delivery, everything you do for clients. Create a space for operations, everything else about running the business. And then a process library. More on that in a second. Next. And I really wish I knew this. This would have cleared up a lot of confusion for us. Is due dates work best when you consider them not the D U E date but the do date. Due dates should indicate when something is done, not by when. There's some nuance here. Of course you need to have, you know, projects need to have deadlines, right? But the particular steps in a project, like writing the first draft of a blog or reviewing a blog or, I don't know, SEO optimization, these should all be mapped to specific days on which team members are going to do them, which takes a little bit of doing, of course. And that's the habits piece. We'll get to that in a second. But only once you have that, you can really see your individual contributors and everyone really can see their commitments for the day. When the Zenpilot system, or any competent system is implemented to its fullest, you should be able to log in and see what you need to get done during that day, meetings included, by the way. And there's nothing more that needs to be done on that day. That's the amount of information within the system that you should be striving for. And finally, coming back to this rule of one person once sitting, not exceeding four hours. When you think of what we call a parent task, like a main task, that might be a deliverable, like a blog post. When you break it down into sub steps, subtasks common. There's two ways it might go wrong. Either the subtasks are too big and they take up multiple days and then you don't know what you're doing on a given day, or they get too granular and there's too many tasks in the system and it's really cumbersome, right? So stick to this one rule. A subtask, a step within something like writing a blog post, should be able to be completed by one person in one sitting and not exceeding four hours. For example, for me, writing the first draft of a blog post often takes more than four hours. So I have one subtask that says write first draft first sitting, and then another subtask scheduled, for example, the next day, write first draft second sitting. And you can stick to that. Here's an example of what this might look like. So there's a subtask clearly assigned, there's a time estimate, there's some information in the description here that tells you more about the steps to be done here. And by the way, March 6th, Zenpilot is running an event account management and ClickUp with Jeff seifer. It's on LinkedIn. Look it up, I'll be running it. So that's tools for processes. The process should live where the work gets done. Primarily, you know, if you're on ClickUp, this should be on ClickUp. And what you should do is to build out a process library. It looks like this. You have A separate space called the process library. You've got folders with templates in them. These are the particular templates each of them is. Think of it as like a model task, right? This should be the model. And if anything changes in your workflow, you first make the changes here, then move them to the ClickUp template center. This is a nuance to be discussed at a later date. This is what one of these model tasks looks inside. And where the magic really happens is within the subtasks, you go deep on those. If there's anything that needs to be done by multiple people, every person needs to have separate subtasks. If it's possible something might happen on separate days, it should all be separate subtasks. One person, one sitting, not exceeding four hours is the rule. And then finally, habits. It doesn't matter how well designed the car is if you can't drive is the analogy that I decided to pick for this for today. So you really need to know how to run the system. I could give you a workspace with a perfectly configured ClickUp system, even including all of your work. But if you don't have the right habits, if you don't have the discipline to update it every day, it will fall into disarray. And this is the key part that agencies are missing. First of all, the first rule is if it's not in ClickUp, it doesn't exist. And this is the kind of the major shift. People are hooked on Slack, really addicted to using it. You need to change your habits to move a lot more communication into ClickUp. And if somebody pings you in a Slack DM about a project, you need to call them out on it. Other team members might need to know about this information. Slack DM's or a really big anti pattern. And aside from sharing deep secrets that they just shouldn't be used for project management. At Zenpilot, for example, we have these daily rituals. We call them setup and shutdown routines. It all begins with our day begins and ends with ClickUp. Begins with cleaning up our ClickUp tasks, making sure that the plan for the day works. If my work for the day suddenly exceeds eight hours, I know I've got a problem and I need to move some things around. Similarly, the shutdown routine is even more important, especially for an async team. When I'm logging off, some people are in the middle of their working day, so my tasks need to be updated. And additionally, as you know, during the day work comes from different directions. Something might come in from Slack, something might come in from email or after a meeting, etc. At the end of the day it lives in ClickUp. So at the end of the day, daily the system is refreshed and updated. Not to mention habits around time estimates and time tracking. And additionally there's the role of the ClickUp champion. One person responsible for making sure that the system is obeyed. And you know that person sends a lot of friendly reminders. And you know, you kind of, you love the work that the person does, even though in the moment it doesn't feel great to get that reminder. But you know, this is the grease in the wheels of your system. Okay. So you need to have a dedicated person for that. If you don't yet we didn't. I tried to be the ClickUp champion without knowing it. Ideally that person is not the leader, but somebody else who's just focused on that. I'm not saying 100% focused. That might be 25% of their time, okay, but still, that is a person that who's ultimately responsible for it. If the system is in disarray, you go to that person to remind them, to remind others to update the system, not updating them, not updating the system for them, because that's a major anti pattern. Now here's where I would tell you that good project management also unlocks great insights into profitability and utilization. I'm just going to very briefly show you this based on ClickUp data. When you have everything in there, clear time estimates, when you've got time tracking in there, you can also put information about your rates in there, et cetera. The top of the mountain as we like to call it in Zenpilot is this, this is not in ClickUp. I mean it's embedded in ClickUp, but we call this a Zenpilot profitability reporting. So this is what's possible when you really have a system that you strictly obey that you can see profitability for clients. You can look at your account managers or portfolio of clients, how it's performing per service line. You can find service lines that are making you extra cash and ones that are losing you money. And I really encourage you to look up Zenpilot profitability reporting. And there's a demo that we have about this on YouTube. I'm really rapidly running out of time here, so trying to wrap up. To conclude, looking back at my project management journey, a lot of it was good. I'm happy about everything I managed to learn and I think a lot of you tried to follow the DIY approach and that's great. But really when we're responsible for results and for people's careers, when we want to set them up for maximum success, we owe it to ourselves to find the optimal practices and to implement them. And the Zenpilot system is one such set of best practices that you can go and implement because otherwise they're not getting the best possible outcome and you're hurting their future track record. And working with an external company like Zenpilot or many others might be this kind of push of external accountability that you need for these changes to finally stick Couple links for you to finish up. If you want to see the state of your project management at your agency right now, go check out the Project Management Health Benchmark under this URL tools.zenpilot.com PM Benchmark. And finally, if you want to hit the easy button on all of this, if you want to find out how you're doing on your agency operator scorecard in terms of utilization where you are when you want to be, target rate where you are when you want to be. Let's get started on that. Go to zenpilot.com call meet our team of experts and we can help you take the journey to clarity in all three keys, processes, habits and tools. And this is my last slide. Thank you so much for the time today. I invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn. By the way, if you're looking to explore the Zenpilot system in more depth, get the ClickUp for Agencies guide. It's on Zenpilot.com under resources. Easy to find Again inviting you to check out our YouTube channel. Lots of great stuff there and much deeper tutorials than what I managed to present here today. And finally, any additional questions. Like I said, Q and A. Not much time left for it over time already. But you can find me on LinkedIn and contact me yakubazenpilot.com you can find me there. Thank you so much.

You can blame the going late on on me not being able to pronounce your name and trying to figure it out. So right on time. If anyone wants to reach out to Cuba so one you can do it within the chat within this community, back in the lobby. It's all right there you can find him. You got his LinkedIn information and all that as well. So if you didn't catch a slide, we're going to have recordings of all the presentations so that everybody can jump in, grab those, share them with your team, do all the good stuff. But Kuba, thanks for joining. We're going to wrap this up. Thank you Chris and then move to the next.

This was fun. Yeah, thanks.