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How Good Visibility Can Help Your Agency Deliver

June 05, 2020 in Tips & Tools

Even a smart, skilled team can struggle to meet project deadlines or deliver intended results. Sometimes this is caused by external factors that are beyond the control of digital project management, but often it’s the result of something called poor visibility. This happens when people lose sight of a project’s end goal and how they plan to get there.

This is especially common in agencies, where teams of people may be working on several different projects at once across the company. For every single agency project, dozens of people might be part of it, whether they’re working on it start-to-finish, or just popping in to lend their expertise on a specific project phase. These include people like web developers, UX designers, designers, copywriters, auditors, project managers and more.

Having a cross-functional team can mean a faster completion time, more eyes on a project and more effective results, thanks to the wide variety of skillsets. The downside? It puts the teams at risk for poor visibility.

In a perfect world, what is good visibility?

Visibility looks different for those in digital project management than it does for team members. For project managers, it means being able to assess the resources required for a project, assign tasks and skilfully anticipate bottlenecks, another common agency problem.

For team members, good visibility allows them to be more efficient with their duties and more effective with inter-team communication. With a clear view of the project’s big picture, they feel confident that their roles matter and they understand what part they play in delivering the project to completion.

The essential components of good visibility are as follows:

  • A centralized station where everybody – especially those in digital project management – can have a bird’s eye view of project progress
  • A clear way to measure progress and results
  • Team members that are responsible for clearly-defined tasks
  • Milestones that help evaluate progress as well as identify challenges
  • A system for managing resources, ensuring your team’s skills are evenly distributed

What tools can you use to increase visibility?

The best way to increase visibility in a fast-paced agency environment is by using project collaboration software. A major advantage of digital project management is that it lets you accomplish all of the above with a single, centralized dashboard. Here’s what that could look like with the right project collaboration software:

Centralized communication: A consistent place for your team members to ask questions, and send and receive updates helps keep them on track. This way, the team can share updates, instead of wondering who has access to certain information.

Use timelines to organize resources: A huge part of digital project management in an agency environment is knowing where your people are. Visual timelines – a key part of project collaboration software – let you know where resources are needed and when they might be available, which in turn allows you to build more accurate project plans.

A visual workflow for increased clarity

Team members lose focus when they are unclear about their tasks or don’t understand how they fit into the overall project plan. With project collaboration software, a visual and functional workflow allows them to see where their work fits in, what milestones they’re required to contribute to and exactly what their tasks involve.

At the end of the day, good visibility is all about bringing unity to your hard-working team. In a fast-paced environment, visibility is a key contributor to delivering projects on time, within budget and with exceptional results.

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TaskBranch is a cloud-based project management suite that makes it easy for digital teams to manage multi-phase projects in one place.