Why I Love ClickUp and Monday
As an agency owner, are you:
*** Struggling to successfully manage your team?
*** Struggling to successfully manage your clients?
*** Struggling to successfully manage your workflow?
If you’re nodding and thinking, “Yes, this is me!” – you’re not alone.
It’s a problem for many agencies.
But why?
One of the biggest reasons this is happening is because you are missing a quality project management tool.
Perhaps you’ve tried using a spreadsheet to manage your workflow. And maybe, in the beginning, this worked for you. But as you add additional projects, different clients, and more team members – what happens to your spreadsheet?
Suddenly, what was a wonderful spreadsheet never gets updated. There’s no way to track if you’re on schedule with a project or know who’s handling what. Spreadsheets simply don’t work – especially as your client list grows and your team expands.
Raise your hand if you’ve been guilty of trying to use productivity tools as a project management tool. It’s another oh-so common mistake. Digital to-do lists and other apps are not what you need to manage client projects. They are great at what they do – but they’re not a proper project management tool. They don’t allow you to:
*** Delegate to team members
*** Monitor deadlines
*** Have conversations about the project
And these are all things that need to happen when you want to deliver a stellar customer experience.
Let’s not forget about…EMAIL.
Have you tried to manage a project via email? It’s okay. We’ve all done it – but email is the worst way to manage a project. You end up spending endless amounts of time emailing team members, emailing clients, and then back to emailing team members – not to mention the time spent in the email search bar trying to find the email you need to begin with. If the email search bar has become your best friend – then that’s a MAJOR red flag that you need a quality project management tool.
Without a quality project management tool, you are never going to be able to successfully scale your agency.
Yes, that’s right.
If you’re reading this and asking yourself, “What does a REAL project management tool look like?” – then you should know that there are three things your project management tool should be able to do.
1) A Project Management Tool Should Allow You to Assign Tasks
When you have a team of people working on projects, it’s crucial that you can assign tasks to various team members, from the graphic designer to the copywriter, you have got to know who’s actively working on a project. Emails definitely don’t allow you to do that! Sure, you can send it, but did they get the email? And is it really going to get done?
A quality project management tool notifies you when a task is assigned to you – and there’s no second-guessing whether the various members of your team are in the loop or not.
2) A Project Management Tool Should Allow You to Assign Due Dates
There’s nothing worse than missed due dates which leave you – and your client frustrated. But unfortunately, if you’re using emails or spreadsheets to keep track of things, it can happen – a lot.
But a project management tool easily allows you to post due dates when assigning work to team members. Everyone involved will know when a task is expected to be completed. Isn’t that so much better for everybody involved to know that work is going to be done by a certain date? The team member has a really clear expectation of when something is supposed to be done, and it’s really obvious if that task doesn’t get done. (Don’t worry – this provides a good opportunity to figure out why the work did not get completed.)
3) A Project Management Tool Should Allow You to Provide Descriptions About the Task
Have you ever wanted to share some thoughts and comments as to how to successfully complete the task? Or provide resources that were shared by the client? What about comments and feedback as the project progresses? Emails aren’t convenient for this. You need a space where you can house all of these things for easy reference.
A project management tool allows for all of this.
You can share the client brief. Team members can ask questions and share feedback from other team members or from the client. Drafts of projects can be shared. Your project management tool is your one-stop-shop for all things!
Assigning tasks and due dates – along with sharing information – is so much easier when you have a quality project management tool.
Of course, the tool needs to be robust enough to handle everything that you and your agency have going on – and that’s why I recommend ClickUp and Monday.com to my clients. These two tools are robust enough to handle the variety of tasks and the many team members that we have touching the task.
There are other project management tools out there, but they don’t have the capabilities or sophistication to give an agency what it truly needs to scale, increase capacity, increase productivity and get you to the next level to help you successfully manage your team.
ClickUp and Monday.com can certainly handle those things, and they have a few features that really make them rock stars in the project management world.
*** You can very quickly see what tasks your team members are working on.
*** You can monitor milestones and see who has too much on their plate or who has some capacity and can take on a little more.
*** They both offer a lot of customization with things such as status updates, the type of project it is, extended due dates or milestones, and how much time a project is expected to take to complete.
There’s a lot of versatility and a lot of opportunity for customization within these two tools – many of the other project management tools just don’t have
No more going back through emails, trying to remember if the copy got done or the graphics got done, or if the client approved it and what needs to be done next.
No more staring at spreadsheets created to manage your workflow that haven’t been updated in weeks.
If you see the red flags waving, then it’s time to get a project management tool.
If you are curious about some of the other tools that I recommend for agency owners to successfully scale their agencies, then get my tool inventory. It’s a PDF that outlines the six tools that agencies need to successfully scale and give you some really good options (and my personal faves) to help you and your agency.