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Reasons Why Project Management is Essential for Client Services

Knowing exactly why project management is essential at a digital marketing agency is rarer and more important than you might think.

After sitting in on countless interview panels with folks who either currently work at an agency or have in the past, I noticed how frequently they spoke to their frustration about not having access to a project management team. Instead, in addition to working on client deliverables, they had to manage strategy, client communication, and prioritization of their work.

1. It Creates More Seamless Communication Between Teams

One of the main factors of client-agency engagement success is communication. When everyone is familiar with the scope of work and the roadmap, it sets the team up for success both at the beginning of and throughout a project’s lifetime.

At Portent, we use Teamwork, a project management tool, as a single source of truth. After each client meeting, our client partners are responsible for delegating all tasks to strategists based on due dates and prioritization. Each task is carefully assigned to create collaboration, efficiency, and organization without overlapping efforts. Meaningful conversations between team members happen within the tool, so we can reference those conversations later if necessary.

If a strategist needs additional information or involvement from another team member, our project management tool allows them to ask questions directly in the comments and give one another feedback.

Having a central location for our conversations also makes cross-team collaboration easier, which eases the burden of working remotely. Instead of setting up meetings and calls, people can easily discuss project details within the tool, creating more efficiency.

2. It Helps Create Greater Individual Accountability

It’s difficult to hold people accountable when expectations aren’t clear. Having a project manager to check in with your teams will help spark conversations that clarify expectations.

At Portent, we plan our work every two weeks by holding sprint planning meetings with every strategist. In these meetings, the project manager goes through every task assigned to the strategist and confirms their work. Our project managers have check-in times built into their schedules, which allows them to follow up with individuals and make sure their tasks are completed on time.

If a project is complex, relies on dependencies, or the strategist has upcoming time off, we can develop a plan to ensure that we can still hit client deadlines.

As Chad Kearns details in his post, “How to Set and Maintain Meaningful Marketing Goals,” client-agency relationships fail when partners on either end of the engagement aren’t setting a realistic timeline for deliverables. For each party to get the most from each other, timelines should be mutually agreed to, not dictated by a singular party.

Sprint planning meetings create space for the strategist to be honest with both the project manager and themselves about their workload and ability to get everything completed on time.

3. It Places a Higher Emphasis on Prioritization

Throughout a client engagement, factors often change. From budgets to timelines to buy-in from key stakeholders, you must continually work to stay aligned on the client’s goals and outcomes.

One way you can work to stay on track to hit the client’s goals and KPIs is to have continual conversations about prioritization.

We create 30-60-90 day plans with our client engagements and translate those into actionable roadmaps with a prioritized list of tasks. By getting client approval and prioritizing the work in collaboration with the strategists on the account, we ensure that the right work is getting done at the right time.

Our client partners make sure future work is forecasted and put into a backlog. The project managers can then take the items from those backlogs and prioritize them further during our sprint planning meetings.

From these points, we hope that you are able to further understand why project management is essential for any business in today’s day and age.