Creative projects are rarely straightforward.
Every client has different preferences and standards, even when you're handling similar projects for them.
If you consider other challenges like unexpected scope changes or frequent edit requests, it's easy for your team to miss deadlines and spend more than you planned.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
You can build a project management system that helps your team adapt to any situation, no matter how challenging.
In this guide, I'll discuss five best practices to manage your team from pre-production to post-production. You’ll also learn how to implement these strategies to help your team manage priorities and communicate better.
Getting projects to completion successfully requires effective planning, a team of experts, and a proper project management process. These are five best practices to help you manage your clients and team simultaneously:
Your first conversation with a client is where you learn about their business, project goals, processes, and other information you need. This is why you should ask relevant questions around things like:
Ask your clients specific questions about their current objectives. These are questions like;
If you're a design agency, this might mean asking if your client's rebrand needs to appeal to a new market segment or attract potential customers from an existing market. For a video production agency, it could mean knowing if the content is meant to attract social media engagement and be relevant to executives and top decision makers.
Learn from your client's history. Ask them if they’ve previously worked with agencies on similar projects. Ask questions like:
You can use their responses to shape your strategy and how you brief your team on the client’s expectations.
Stakeholder information in this context keeps you aware of the persons in charge of the project and who you'll report to. This helps you know who to send a message to when you need to explain a strategy or get approval for your deliverables.
Finally, don't forget to get brand guidelines on how you should design or create content. This can include the brand colors, logo, and tone (for their content).
After the kickoff call, write a detailed brief and attach it to every task you assign from the project. This informs your team of everything the client prioritizes that could make the project successful.
You can use a client portal like ManyRequests for this. The platform lets you add all the brief to the task assigned do your team member can always read them when they need to.
Buffer time is the extra time factored into a project schedule to account for any unexpected delays and revisions. The extra time gives your team the breathing space to handle any project changes.
Adding a buffer time:
The buffer times you allocate depend on the project's complexity, your process of outsourcing and reviewing deliverables, and your team's capacity.
If you need specific skills that few on your team have, you'll need more time to complete the project. So, factor this in while agreeing to a deadline when speaking to your client.
A rule of thumb is to assess your team's capacity to know how much workload they can take within a specific timeframe. If you need to hire more contractors, do so, go protect the integrity of your agency and stick to deadlines.
To be safe, add a 20% stretch to the time allocated for a project. If a design project typically takes 10 days, 20% would be 2 extra days. Add those extra 2 days to the original project date to accommodate changes that may affect the final deliverable.
📌 Pro Tip: Be careful not to let your team become too relaxed. Parkinson's law has shown that your team members may slow down when they feel there's a lot of time to complete a task and only speed up when under pressure.
You can use the Requests dashboard to see their task statuses as they work. This helps you know the stage they are in as they work. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like:
From this view, you can see:
Your project management system is only as effective as the team behind it. You need capable talents to deliver the best quality to your clients, and you can only get them by being intentional about your hires.
The best way to achieve this is to build relationships with talents even before you need them.
Connect with writers, designers, and developers through industry events, LinkedIn or X (Twitter), or online communities for industry experts. This way, whenever you need their expertise, you can reach out to ask for their availability and hire them based on demand.
But if you can't easily connect with experts, hire them directly through paid trials.
This would mean putting out a call for designers, writers, video editors etc. based on what your needs are, and asking them to complete a short task. This can be:
Once hired, write what you need from each team member so everyone knows their responsibilities and wouldn't slack. This includes:
Other ways you can build your talent network include:
You can also include them in project planning discussions, and commend them at every milestone they reach in the agency.
My editor did it so well here:
(P.S: this did give me a needed boost.)
A tiered approval system is a structured hierarchy for decision-making within an agency. It defines the desks (virtual or physical) that tasks go through to get approved.
Creating a tiered approval system;
Here's how to build one:
Create levels for every task. Here's an instance you can use:
Before anything reaches project managers or stakeholders, the creative team should conduct internal reviews.
They'll assess each other's works, catch errors that they may have missed, and refine ideas together. If you're using ManyRequests, your team members can integrate Slack into the platform to have these discussions.
Here's how:
Once the creative team has reviewed their work, they’ll send it to the project manager, who will confirm if the deliverables align with the project scope and client requirements.
The creative director focuses on the overall vision of the project. They check for the brand’s voice, aesthetics, and strategic objectives.
At this stage, the project manager and creative director are gatekeepers — they only let client-ready work move to the next stage so the client doesn't get low-quality deliverables.
Here, the project manager presents the approved work to the client.
Depending on who your team communicates with on the client side, you may get feedback from their marketing managers, product leads, or brand representatives.
To make communication with your client easy:
Client portals like ManyRequests make feedback easy. Our Request feature lets you discuss project details, including feedback and edit requests, with your client, and you can assign these requests back to your team on the same portal.
There's also a messaging feature to discuss anything related to the project. For context, if your client needs to inquire about one of your services, you can discuss it with them in Messages.
The deliverables should be finalized at this stage, and a summary of every important decision and change made during the project should be included. Outline what you need from the executives—full approval, feedback, or confirmation—to send them to the client.
If your team is working on several clients at once, they're most likely juggling many tasks simultaneously. And no matter how efficient they are, it's a recipe for burnout and reduced productivity.
Reduce the volume of work a team member handles to two or three tasks at any given time. With ManyRequests, you can use the Priority feature to indicate the tasks they should prioritize, and which they can work on later.
Here's a screenshot.
You can see that some tasks have high priority, and others have low priority.
You can also use the project status feature to know the stage a task is in before you assign another one.
For context, this screenshot shows the different stages of task completion (In Progress, Scheduled, Pending Feedback)
Here are some tips for reinforcing resource allocation rules:
Allocate 70% of your team’s time to high-priority, long-term projects and 30% to quicker, less demanding tasks.
This division gives primary projects the attention they deserve, and your team can still complete the smaller tasks without getting overwhelmed.
Don't overload the same set of team members with the same set of tasks.
Some tasks are more demanding, and you may continuously assign those tasks to certain team members.
Working on the same tasks every time can tire them out, and it doesn't give other teammates a chance to grow. A tip is to assign it to another team member and ask the experienced members to supervise.
Time tracking shows the amount of time your team spends on each task and their work pattern.
You can allocate resources based on how long they spend on a particular task. For example, if your designers spend too much time on repetitive revisions, you can revisit your approval process to reduce feedback loops.
You need a strategic approach to implementing new project management for creative agencies— you need to balance improving efficiency without affecting ongoing client work.
Here's how to make these changes effectively:
Review your current workflow before implementing best practices.
One way to do this is to audit recent projects to see if there were things you did wrong—
Talk to your team leads about daily operational challenges – they can often spot issues that aren't visible in project reports.
From this assessment, prioritize 2-3 best practices to focus on initially.
For example, if you find that your team missed deadlines about 70% of the time, you can set buffer times to take some of the load off their shoulders.
Start by implementing one practice that solves your most pressing challenge.
Take it one at a time to avoid overwhelming your team members.
Make sure you have the necessary tools in place before rolling out new practices. A project management platform like ManyRequests can centralize your workflows, but you'll also need:
Train your team leads and members who adapt easily first. Then branch it out to other team members, so they can put them through.
You can introduce new practices with reference guides and host training sessions. Record these sessions— where you explain the dos and don'ts of the new practices— for future reference and new team members.
Track metrics that directly impact your agency's success. It could be;
Once a practice proves successful with one team or project type, document what worked and why.
You can create a playbook for rolling out the practice to other teams or project types— add the common challenges and solutions based on your first implementation.
Update your clients on any process improvements that may affect them. Make sure you frame these changes positively — focus on how new practices will improve their experience, with faster turnaround time, for instance.
If you're changing operations, your team members may take it in strides or not as well as you expect. Watch for signs of ineffective implementation if you find:
Structured freedom. It's when you set boundaries for a project's time and budget, but you give your team autonomy within those boundaries to explore creative solutions.
This depends on the kind of creative project and deliverables. Most creative projects use a 2-week minimum timeline— at least (3-4 days for brainstorming and ideation, 5-7 to execute the project, and 2-3 days for revision and finalization).
The three functions of project management are Communication, Coordination, and Collaboration.
Any successive creative project management process should include setting measurable goals for the project outcome, assigning tasks to team members, and tracking the tasks' progress and KPIs with relevant tools.
You need more than good team members to create high-quality creative work— other factors also contribute to the success of any creative project. You have to factor in your team’s satisfaction levels, convenience, and the agency's profitability.
You can do this on a centralized platform made specifically for creative agencies, like ManyRequests. We’ve helped many creative agencies improve how they work with their clients and team members. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to see how it works.
