It is difficult to keep clients and stakeholders happy. It is even more difficult to deliver a great project that keeps clients and stakeholders satisfied.
Working with clients can be a delicate balance between quality, price, and time. But you don’t have to compromise.
Here are four ways that a company/agency can shift its focus from a project-first approach to a client-first one.
- Automate project operations
- Encourage team members
- Real-time reports are your best friend
- A secret weapon to optimize your optimization
Positive client relationships are crucial for agency success. It’s not just about your agency’s reputation but also how you ensure that there will be future work.
Your operations can be managed so that your teams collaborate and you can concentrate on building client relationships.
1. Cohesive and automated operations
Agency operations are key to shifting the focus away from a project-first approach and towards a client-first one. Automating these operations is the key to success.
Consider this example: For instance, the internal operations of the company are not coordinated and projects are poorly scoped. People are also working overtime, and there is little communication between departments.
We have all been there. It’s not something that the team is interested in. There are many other things to do before this can be considered. There is also a chance that members of the team will feel stressed.
Every project should run smoothly for the Project Manager. A lack of clear goals is responsible for 37% of all project failures. It is much more difficult to maintain a positive relationship with clients if people are stressed out by a lack of clarity.
A combination of resource management and project planning is essential for successful projects. A platform to manage your work is a great way to achieve that cohesion.
The key takeaway
If you have disjointed operations it is a sign that your agency may still be client-first and not project-first. To shift to a client-first mindset, you must work closely with your client to accurately estimate the scope of the project.
2. Team members know who they are working with
This second approach is easier to use than the project-first approach. Collaboration is key, both with clients and internally. Why is team collaboration so important Simply because your team members are the backbone of your project’s success.
A platform that allows you to see project deadlines and gives visibility to what your team is working on improves transparency. Your team should be full but not excessively allocated to meet your deadlines.
Your teams should be motivated. The forecast gives teams the ability to collaborate with other teams in a unified platform.
time tracking and email integrations, Gantt Charts, and budgeting are the most requested and used features of project management software.
A project management platform is used by 66% of organizations to communicate with clients (Capterra 2015). External collaboration is crucial to client success.
The forecast gives clients a view into project operations. Clients can also access live shareable reports to stay informed.
Takeaway
Collaboration is key, both internally and externally. The client’s participation throughout the project is crucial to create amazing digital projects.
3. Accurate reporting makes all the difference
It is exhausting to look at five different places to find one metric. The metric may not be accurate. Similar to disjointed operations that cause the client-first focus to be placed on the project, rather than the client-first, inaccurate reports can also occur.
A connected management system that verifies real data from all agencies provides transparent and detailed business insights.
One platform provides one source of truth for project operations, time management, and task management. You can be proactive and not reactive by being able to see what’s not going according to plan.
Project management companies can save 28x more money when they manage projects successfully (PMI,2017). You will get more accurate reports if you combine projects, business intelligence, and resources.
This page will provide information about the reporting tools you can use to help your project.
The key takeaway
You can see what is happening in your agency and be proactive with clients instead of reacting to projects.
4. Your secret weapon
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help you work more efficiently. Why? Simply because AI allows you to spot potential delays or deviations in projects. An AI-enabled project management platform can take care of tedious and manual project work.
It is easy for team members to log their time to tasks or suggested time entries. This makes it easier to get work done. Your agency will also have more detailed reports about where and when the time was spent on what projects.
Automated allocations can optimize your resource schedules and improve how you manage future projects. Automation is a powerful tool for agencies. It frees up time to build client relationships, support the client’s businesses, and fill your agency’s pipeline.
Takeaway
Client-first means you can spend more time on optimizing your projects and not just executing them.
Having a platform that has everything connected – from team collaboration, project planning, budget planning, forecasting, resource scheduling, capacity management, and task management – will provide your agency with the means to focus on client relations with every operation that is taken care of.
