This Is What Your Agency Project Management System Should Look Like

In this video, I'm going to walk you through exactly what your project management system should look like in its final state. So if you're an agency that's implementing or about to implement a brand new project management system, this is what it should look like if you're trying to actually gain momentum and make sure that this is the last project management implementation that you're ever going to go through. And this is exactly what we're trying to build. We've built this across 3,000 different agencies, helping them implement project management software, especially ClickUp, to help them really start building more productive projects, profitable and healthy teams that actually build momentum in their project management system rather than having to re implement a new system every other year. And so when you're designing your project management system, I want to go over the specific roles that you should be building this for and really talk about what this is going to look like again in its final state. So essentially what you're trying to build, and this is what every agency is trying to achieve every time they implement something. But because project management systems are, are very complex, they're basically a blank canvas when you go ahead and actually start your free trial or start working within it, it gets to be a little bit difficult. But what you're trying to build is a simple but powerful project management system. And essentially what I mean by that, on the simple side, you're trying to make it so that it's very easy for your team to use. They can come in and know what they need to do, how they need to do it, so on and so forth. It's not very complex for them. They don't get lost and frustrated within that system. But in addition to that simple piece of it, it also needs to be powerful enough for your leadership team to get good visibility and reporting out of the tool as well. Because you want to be able to start to understand, especially as an agency, how profitable each of your clients are, how utilized your team is, how healthy each of your clients are, and how your team is performing overall. You need that 30,000 foot view of the business and so you need this in your project management system. But sometimes when it's powerful, you think it's going to be really hard for your team to use. And so that's why people get a little confused in how they should actually go ahead and set this up. So really what you're trying to build in this end state, and I'll take these role by role by role of what we're trying to accomplish and achieve here in terms of how they're going to get their work done. But we're really trying to build clarity for every level in the organization. Again, this is not just clarity for the leadership team. We also need to build the system for those individual contributors that are working in the day to day. Because if they're not doing so well, how are we going to get the visibility? Because good data in is going to give us good data out. If you want to have a good dashboard or something like that, you need to make sure your team is working well in the system they're using, consistently tracking their time and things like that. So really the roles that we're building the system for, and again, every agency might have a different org structure, org chart or hierarchy, but at the end of the day you have five main core roles that you probably have within the organization. And so that first one, as I mentioned, is going to be those individual contributors that are working on a day to day basis. This could be contractors, freelancers or full time employees that are just coming in to get their work done that's assigned to them. In addition, you also have the account managers and your project managers and all those people are working together to build strategy for clients to plan out those projects and to get the work done. And I'll jump into all these individually in just a moment. But after that you also again have your leadership team, which is pretty obvious they're there to be able to see after all that work is happening, that 30,000 foot view of the business. But then in addition to all those roles, you also need to think about your clients when you're implementing this system. Because your clients also want to have clarity in terms of what you've done for them, what you're doing for them, what the results are and sort of how the strategy has adjusted. So all these different roles we need to build for, we need to build the system for them so they can get clarity to do their jobs well. So that again, we can build it simple enough for our team to use, but also powerful for the leadership team to get that good visibility that they're looking for. So now let's take the step by step. And the first one I want to focus on is those individual contributors. Again, this could be contractors, freelancers, full time employees, whoever is on your team that needs to come in to work every single day and know what's on their plate. So really the questions that they're asking that we need to answer for them with this system is, the first one is obvious what's on my plate today. And what's actually coming up in the future. So every single day, your individual contributor should be able to go into your project management system and have a detailed task list of everything that's on their plate. And this may seem very easy, but oftentimes it's not and people don't have all the tasks in there. And so basically your individual contributors come into work each day. They, they don't have this detailed task list. And so then they go to Slack or email to try to figure out, hey, what do I need to do today? So they start asking their manager, the project managers, account managers, whoever. And so they're not near as productive as they could be. So they're not getting clarity. And then they're a little bit frustrated because they're wasting an hour, two hours every morning trying to figure out what they're supposed to be doing. In addition, with that, they also need to know what they need to prioritize. So out of all that work, out of all those tasks on my plate, what do I need to do first thing in the morning to make sure I get that done? Because I might be blocking someone else. So they need to also have that priority in there. And then in addition to that, that's really the what that's what I need to do. But I also need to know how I need to do that as well as really why I need to do that in addition. So the how is really going to be. We also need to make sure that the process for how they're going to do that work is living exactly right in the work. So I'll show you what this looks like. But essentially the process needs to live where the work gets done. You need to have that standard operating procedure that how to documentation should be embedded directly in those tasks so they can click into that task and know exactly how to do it as well. So they provide sort of consistent results for your clients and they're following your proven process that you have as an agency, especially as you bring new people on board. And then in addition, they also need to have that, that why or the additional context from the client, like what's the objective, what we're trying to achieve for this task? Because both of those things, the how and that why, is going to help them make sure they get that task done right the first time. And so when we talk about productivity gains, a lot of times that productivity gains could be coming from this detailed task list, but it's also coming from them getting their work done the first time. Because as you can imagine, if you have a bunch of round revision that's going to make us that much slower. And so what we want really is again, as you can see here, in my project management system, especially ClickUp right here, I have a view where I'm not having to go into all these different folders and lists as you might often have to do in a project management system. I'm able to have all my work organized in those places, but then funnel all of this up to me right here so that the signee is me. I'm grouping this by due date so I know what I need to do today. I have that priority flag right there. In addition, I know what I'm going to be doing in the future as well. So I'm able to plan my work very well because all of this is in here with great detail. So as you can see also I'm able to click into any of these tasks here. So if I click into this one you'll see I have the what this is what I need to do. And then I can also see the how I need to do it as well. And then if I need to, if I'm all communicating in one place, I can easily navigate to sort of that higher level deliverable like this one for client onboarding and the communication all happens in one place. I'll also be able to get that additional context for the client here as well. But that makes it so easy for me to click into this. I have either a link to a standard operating procedure document right in here or the description for how I'm going to do it directly in this task so I can easily follow our proven process. And then as I work on this task, I can also track my time directly here, making it super easy. I don't have to jump to another system, it's all in one place for me. Go ahead, track my time. As I'm working this task, I finish my task and I go ahead, close it, stop my timer and I can move on with my day. So that makes it so easy for your individual contributors to get their work done, have one view for them to see all this, navigate, see that communication, see the how to track their time and do all of their work inside of one place. So again, that's your individual contributors. Super important because you're going to have a lot of these and if you want to get good data out of the system, you need to put good data into the system. And so now after our individual contributors, we also have our account managers and so they might have their individual contributor work that they're going to be working on, but they also need to see sort of a higher level of some projects across all of their clients. So for them, they're going to have a few different views as opposed to just that. My task view, as I called it earlier. They're really curious about where are projects currently standing for their clients and maybe are there any issues they need to bring up with the clients in those conversations that they're having with the clients on a weekly, biweekly or monthly basis. So they should have a view just like this. So everyone's working in their task view. But now I have an overview of all of my different clients that I'm the account manager for. I can see all of the deliverables that we're doing for them. I can see the status of those deliverables, I can see when those deliverables are due, how much time has been tracked, the overall progress of all this. And I can jump into any of these and I can get all the communication that I need for this as well, because all of it's going to be in one place. So it's very easy for me as the account manager to be able to see, hey, this one's in client review. I can navigate down, see all those tasks, see maybe where we're behind or maybe we're ahead of schedule and really what's happening. So I can bring this up with the client because sometimes maybe it's blocked by the client and we need to bring that up and say, hey, we're falling behind on this project because you haven't gotten your work done client. So we need help for you to get this approved, for us to continue moving with this project. And so all of this work is going to help me understand exactly where all those projects, all those deliverables, and all those really specific tasks are. So I can easily check in and understand where we are with our timelines for our clients. And so that's a great view for them. But in addition to that, they also need to have a good overview of all their clients when it comes to those sort of burn rates. So we have contracts for each client, whether that's a retainer, whether it's a larger project, and we need to sort of see how much either maybe it's points, maybe it's time, whatever it may be, we need to see how much we've actually consumed of that to see how are we getting into scope creep, how are we doing on this, just to make sure we're profitable on those projects as well. So your account manager should have a view just like this for them to easily dive in and see how much really we've estimated for that client, what's that project budget in terms of time or points or whatever that is for your agency, how much we've actually tracked against that, how much is remaining and how much overall have we consumed? Are we doing well? Are we pacing a little bit ahead of schedule, behind schedule, so on and so forth. They should have a great view of that information as well, so they can manage their accounts well. And then after that, in addition, they also need to have somewhat of an invoicing overview. This is a nice to have for your account manager so you're able to kind of integrate your project management system with other tools like QuickBooks or Xero that allows them to not have to go ping your finance team all the time. They're going to have one view in here that basically shows them, their clients, the invoice statuses. Are they paid? What's the amount? They can click out to the invoice to see it as well. So they'll have all this bill to manage it in one place to make it very easy for them to be able to, hey, do I need to ping the client because they haven't paid their invoice? Should we stop work here because they haven't paid, so on and so forth. That also makes it very easy for them to manage their accounts. In addition, the last one that's super nice to have and a great benefit of the ClickUp project management system is the ability to take all of your notes and documentation in one place. So as the team is working within all of the work that's happening in my clients, these lists and folders that we have over here, I can also, as I jump into meetings with those clients, I can take of these all, all of my notes in one place. That way it's all organized. If the team needs to see any of this, I can easily link out from maybe a task that we're working on to this, these notes within this document here to make sure everyone's aware of what I had a conversation with a client about. Maybe they were a little frustrated with something, maybe they're happy with something. I can easily put that in one place and then communicate that out to the rest of the team. So all of my notes are going to live in one place, very easy for the rest of the team to find. In addition, client overview, if we're doing sales to delivery handoffs, that's also all going to be in Here as well. So we're linking out to everything, making it super easy for me to centralize all this documentation if I have a to do that comes from a meeting I had with a client as well as an account manager, I can easily create a task from that as well. Just find the correct location, just like this, assign it out, time estimate, due date, put all that information in there. So very easy for your account managers to manage their accounts, but also provide all the necessary context to the rest of the team on what needs to be done for those clients and really the why behind all that work that we're doing. So now after our account managers, we also have the project managers. And so the project managers are going to working hand in hand with those account managers, with those individual contributors as well, to help plan out our timelines. So your account managers might be the ones that are building the strategy and really building the why behind things and building those relationships with the clients. But now our project managers need to come in and really understand how much capacity the team actually has to take on a new project to build realistic timelines for the client. Because the account manager might say, hey, we need to do this blog, we need to launch this campaign. But then the project managers can also come in and say, hey, we're not going to be able to realistically get that done until mid August or late August, unless maybe we bring in another copywriter or designer and so we can bring in another contractor. So they need to have all of that visibility in the system for to be able to do their jobs well here. So the biggest thing for them is the workload view that they should have. And it takes time to get this right. This is the biggest thing for agencies that can be difficult and we have a lot of training on how to get your workload view as accurate as possible. A lot of this is going to come down to the time estimates, the due dates and the tasks with assignees on all of those. That's really going to give you good visibility and workload. And I'll put that training in the description below as well as the top right of this video for you to go ahead and watch that. If you're trying to build a more realistic workload view, but this is so important for your project manager, so they should be able to easily come here as they're trying to figure out who has bandwidth, who doesn't. They should have this realistic view here to understand what's happening across the team, how much work is on all of our team's plates. So in Addition, with this, we also need to have all of our work in the system. So a big thing that we live by is if it's not ClickUp, it didn't happen. So we need to make sure that, hey, I have my operational work in here too. If we have internal meetings, that needs to be in ClickUp so that I know that time is going to be on someone's plate. So if that time is not, and so we have an hour meeting each week and that's not inside of our system, we're not going to have that hour documented here. So I might put work on someone's plate that doesn't actually have that bandwidth to do it. So this should be as realistic as possible. Again, it does take time, but once you get those time estimates, those due dates, assignees on all of your tasks, it's going to make it that much easier. But as you can see here, I now know, hey, Amy does not have time. She's over capacity on this specific day. Alex is at capacity here and I can start to understand where we have time to really start scheduling out work for the team. So this is going to make it very easy. And now with project managers, in addition, what they also need with this is the ability to easily create projects to remap due dates and assign those projects out. So I'll show you what that workflow really looks like. But this is going to be so important for your project managers to be able to do this and really communicate with again, those account managers and individual contributors to get this work done on time. So inside of ClickUp, they're going to be able to easily come and a lot of this is going to have to do with you building out a really good process library with all of your templates in here to be able to use all these. But as a project manager, I should be able to communicate with those account managers and say, hey, for shrut farms, we need to create this blog post or whatever it may be. Maybe it's a whole website redesign. This is what we need to do for our strategy. But I'll be able to come in here, I'll be able to browse templates after I've looked at to see who has the capacity to take this on. I can easily come in here and find my template here for the blog post, use this template, name it whenever, we'll just do blog post example, just like that, remap my dates and let's say that we're not gonna be able to get this done until September 4th, just like that. Use the template and then that's gonna go deploy it. And because I've built a template inside of ClickUp with all of my time estimates, with all my due dates, that's going to build it out perfectly for me to be able to see all that. So all of this is now listed in here with again, due dates, our time estimates. I can remap those if I need to. But now is where I'm going to have a good view for me to be able to actually assign all this workout. So as you can see here, I have an assignee view for my project managers to easily be able to assign all these projects out right after I actually go ahead and upload them. So what I'm able to do is I can actually navigate here, I can go into my task assignment view just like this. And so in all of my templates, I've actually added a delivery rule custom field that allows me to use that and say, hey, who is the strategist for Shrut Farms? Or who is the copywriter for Shrut Farms? And now I can easily grab all of those tasks after I've deployed them and I can go ahead and assign them out. So let's say I'm the strategist for Shrut Farms. I'll sign it out just like that. As you can see now all those tasks are assigned, say the copywriter here, I'll grab all those tasks, is Kuba there, I'll get him assigned to all those tasks and then I can just go down the list like that. So now we have proofer, we have designer. All those tasks can be grouped together to allow me to easily assign those to my team. And so then after that, another big view for your project managers with that is let's say now we need to reschedule some due dates because maybe we had some team members fall behind on some work or maybe your client and get back to you in time. So if we build those tasks into our workflows and we also have all these dependencies, I can actually utilize a Gantt view here with some settings turned on that allows me to reschedule dependencies and also skip the weekends when I'm remapping these due dates. So now as a project manager, if we do fall behind, I can easily take this and let's say we didn't complete the blog interview with a client on this day. I need to push that out. As you can see, that's going to push out all of the tasks in this dependency chain like that and also push out the Last task within that cycle there. So that's going to help us remap due dates and make your lives of your project managers that much easier to deploy work to remap due dates and assign that work out to the rest of the team or reassign it if they have to as well. If maybe we lost a team member, we need to bring someone new on as a strategist. We'll be able to do all that work in the system. So you're going to have your project managers, your account managers, your individual contributors. The they're all gonna be working together to work and serve your clients well, deliver great results for them. And so that's really the big making it easy for them to use. That's a simple part of this that we need to build out. And so those are kind of the views that you can leverage there. And so now after all those different roles, once we're actually working with our clients, we're getting good data into the system, people are completing their work. Now your leadership team needs to funnel up a level and really zoom out to get that 30,000 foot view of the business. So now what they're concerned most with is really how profitable are we? So we just did all that work, but is it profitable to the business? So this is super important, especially in service based businesses. You could be working with a lot of different clients and maybe you have great relationships with clients, but sometimes they aren't the most profitable. Or maybe it's a service line that you love, but that might not be the most profitable service line to you. But sometimes if you don't get that good visibility, to know which of our clients, which of our projects, which of our service lines are actually most profitable to the business, you're not going to be able to make good, good decisions based off of data here to really drive the business forward. And I've worked with plenty of agencies who once they got this visibility, they realized that this certain group of clients, we had great relationships with them, but they weren't actually profitable to the business. We were doing way too much work for them, it was taking too much time and we weren't actually making any money off those services. So they really switched their ICP and really saw a big boost in their profitability. And so as you can see here, what we need to provide the leadership team is a nice view of profitability. To understand how profitable projects are, maybe do we need to adjust our prices to increase that profitability? How profitable are certain services, how profitable are certain clients? And so I can jump in here and I can get all of that data just like this. So again, this comes from good inputs from the system. This comes from your team tracking their time well, having its structure and hierarchy in your system to be able to start to understand this, having the right custom fields to be able to sort and filter down by specific service lines or work categories, whatever you want to call them. So if I need to see how well we are within certain retainers or projects or certain clients, I can funnel all of that down within my reporting here. And so now I can start to see how profitable we are across certain months and across all of my different clients here, I can nail all of that work down just like this. So whether it's Apple Master or Microsoft Walmart, I can start to see all that information directly in here. So in addition with that, what's also super important for them is understanding utilization and overall time and capacity across the team. This is going to help me know, can we bring on another project or a client? Are we estimating our projects well? Is the team well utilized overall? So now I also am going to have the visibility start to understand that information because now I could start to see utilization. How much do we actually have our team members involved in billable client work? Sometimes if you go through this and get great visibility, you might start to see that, hey, we're only at 30% capacity across the entire team, which is a huge red flag. So maybe we might be able to either bring on a ton of new clients, if that's a possibility, or we might have to get rid of some team members because they're not utilized at all, because we want to get to that 75 to 85% range. So we're actually bringing in good money for the business and actually being profitable and not wasting a lot of money on underutilized team members there. So we want to have that visibility, but also just a good overview of of time in general because we want to know how much available time we have as an agency, how much we've actually estimated out within our projects, within our project management system, and then how much time we actually tracked. Because as you could see here, we're going to be maybe we have 480 hours available. We want to try to fill up as much of that as possible. We also want to start to see how well are we estimating our projects versus how much we've actually tracked on those projects. So I'll start to be able to see all this as well. Then as you'll notice, maybe in August we have a lot of out of office time, as you can see, that's all pulled down here. We have this out of office there. And so in August a lot of the team members are going on vacation. So we don't have the ability to bring out as much work as we normally could in other months because you'll see that available time drops down a little bit. You'll see our estimated is a little bit too high and tracked there. So that's clearly not super healthy within the month of August. So we need to have this great visibility to really build the business, scale the business and run the business more efficiently overall. Catch those red flags, be proactive and provide a better work life balance for our team. And then in addition to that, what's super important for our leadership team is going to be client health in general. So your leadership team should have a good view, a central view just like this that shows them all of their clients in one place, what the status of those clients are, the health scores, NPS can be brought in as well, services, objectives, billing, so on and so forth. All of this data is in one view. For me as a leadership team to be able to see all of this right here. So I'm not having to go ask all of my account managers or project managers how well this client is doing. I can get all of it funneled into one place so that I can be very proactive and start to understand, oh wow, we're really dropping forest root farms. Health score has gone down. I can also dig in to understand why that may be because our account managers are providing these weekly updates after their calls. They so now as a leadership team, I can kind of know, hey, do we need to jump into a conversation with this client? Do we need to bring on some maybe new resources to kind of help maybe get some timelines back on track? Whatever it may be, I can be much more proactive as opposed to reactive to help prevent those client fires. So you want to get all of this in one place. So that's very easy for the leadership team to see that information. And then in addition, we also want to be able to see team performance and time reporting as well. Because super important for team performance, we want to understand who has good habits in the system, who doesn't have great habits. Are we actually following our timelines and then just really being able to hold the team accountable? So the more that we can get into one system to start to understand this, the better. So if I want to start to understand how my team is actually performing, I Can look at this to know, hey, these are specific teams, these are specific users who has a lot of overdue tasks, who's pacing well and actually closing all their tasks and actually working maybe ahead, who's closing tasks that don't have time on it, and then who is just getting the work done that's actually assigned to them? Because we want to live by the methodology of the due date is the due date, the do date, when you should actually get that work done. So we want to be able to see who is actually following those timelines that we've given them as an individual contributor to be able to start to understand who's building healthy habits and maybe not so healthy habits in the system, because we need consistent usage across the team to be able to get good visibility in the long run. So you want to have great reports like this that are going to show us how well our team is actually performing in the system and then in addition, just where time has gone for our business. So as I build out a good hierarchy in my system and I can leverage these time reporting dashboards inside of ClickUp especially, and this is available in most project management systems. But I'll be able to start to understand how much time we spent maybe in delivery work for our clients, in operational work and those professional development, recruiting, maybe finance, accounting, all that work is there. Or maybe actually how much time we spent in growing the business as well for our agency, how much time did we spend in sales and marketing versus actually delivering client work? In addition, how much time do we spend in certain clients here and specific contracts or retainers? All that information should be so visible to you to make it very easy to understand where time actually went month by week, by year, whatever it may be, whatever dates you need to pull, that information should be crystal clear for you as a leadership team. And so now after the leadership team, once they understand all that and they can really drive the business forward and have those good visibility and reports for them, we also need to think about our clients, because clients, again, they need to understand really four main questions. And this is especially what's going to be brought up in those account management meetings. They want to know what did we do since we last talked? What was the result of what we actually did? What did we learn from that and then what are we doing because of that? So you want to get all of that work in front of them, build them a very easy to use portal that they can see this information, that they can see what work you're doing for them. They can see what work you've completed for them, they can see what results were actually brought from that work that's been completed. Because we want to be able to build the story for our clients, get all that one place so that we can really prove that roi, prove that great relationship that we have so that maybe when the renewal conversation comes around, it's an easy no brainer, let's continue with this relationship. So the more organized and the better you can provide this visibility for your clients just like this, any nice portal view like this to show them, hey, this is the work that we're doing, this is what's in progress, this is what's in review. As you can see multiple different views for them to be able to see all that information as well as what we've actually completed and then what the results were. So all of that is going to be one portal for our clients to be able to see that information, making it very easy for them to understand what we've done, what we're doing and the results from that work. So we want to provide this clarity for all of these different levels of the organization, our clients, our leadership team, project managers, account managers and individual contributors. And that's really what you're trying to build with your project management system. And obviously it takes some time to get there. I do have a complete training on that if you look in the description below, if you want to really see how you can actually build this entire system to give you that visibility. But this should offer a very good overview of what your project management system should look like in the end state. If you have any questions about that, feel free to leave them in the comment section below. Otherwise, watch that next training that you'll see in the description below as well, that you can take your system from scratch all the way to get this visibility for every level within organization, to create clarity for all and really build that simple but powerful project management system.