Agencies – Client Projects

In Teamhood, you can find two options for Agency project management – Client projects and Team tasks. This post aims to explain the first use case created to help manage multiple client projects.

Projects Structure

Today we will model service-type agencies that have from 2 to 50 employees and 10-100 projects simultaneously. For the sake of simplicity, this example is based in a single workspace, however, you could use multiple workspaces when setting up your projects.

Client focus vs project focus vs team focus

To get the most value out of Teamhood, you will need to decide what is the main focus of your setup which is reflected by boards. Each Teamhood workspace can contain multiple boards. Boards are powerful containers as they can be shared with 3rd parties, and made private. Each board can have a different workflow and row structure. Boards are ideal for grouping similar work items and separating them from the rest. We will cover 3 common cases of how boards can be used, based on which perspective is your main focus.

1. Boards as clients

Suppose you want to build everything around a client so that you can share data directly from Teamhood or maybe even invite clients to participate as readers/collaborators. In that case, we recommend to create one board per client.

This one is ideal if you have 5-50 clients and for each client, you have at least 10 tasks (mini-projects).

Benefits:

• Ability to share the whole board with your client
• Ability to make it private for certain groups of people
• Ability to invite your client as a reader or limited collaborator among tasks
• Ability to report on board level across all projects in that board

Tradeoffs:

• Not convenient if you have more than 50 active clients (you will have a long list of boards in your workspace)
• Optimized for a larger number of projects per client, 10 or more. If you have less, you could consider one board for all clients

2. Boards as mini-teams

If your agency is sized around 10-25 employees, and you have well-defined teams of different functions, for example, engineering, design, and sales. We recommend either splitting them into different workspaces or boards. As we decided to do everything in a single workspace, we will go for a separate board per each team.

Benefits:

• Ability to define the unique process for each team (Kanban board workflow)
• Ability to report on each team individually by using Board as a filter value
• Ability to separate work scope, easier to use for team members
• Ability to restrict access on board level only to team members

Tradeoffs:

• Less suitable if you want to involve your clients in parts of the process

3. Boards as project groups/portfolios

This one is focused on a fairly large amount of projects in parallel. If your agency runs 50+ projects in parallel and each has at least 10 tasks we recommend focusing on project throughput. You should attempt to group/categorize your projects and split them into different boards. Few ideas on how to group/categorize:

• By time period (quarter)
• By type of project (design, engineering, etc.)
• By client (same as option 1)
• By manager/coordinator responsible for projects

Benefits:

• Fit for a fairly large amount of projects in parallel
• Focus on the coordinator/project owner
• Easier standardization

Tradeoffs:

• Less convenient for team members
• Less suitable for sharing with clients

4. Rows as projects

If your projects tend to have more than 10 tasks or if you would like to have project-level reporting – go for rows as projects. This way, you would be using a single board and creating different rows for each project.

5. Items as projects

If you end up having more than 25 projects per board – go for items as projects. Less reporting capabilities but far more optimized for throughput and visualization.

You can read more about data structuring in Teamhood here.

Users Roles and 3rd Parties

Each project coordinator or manager should be an admin in the workspace and then the rest of the team – collaborators.

3rd parties

You can invite freelancers or external consultants who are contributing to your projects. Invite them as guests and assign limited collaborator or reader roles. The reader gets access to everything, while limited collaborator is limited to items assigned. Read more about roles and access rights.

Tagging

The golden standard is to use Tags for clients. This enables filtering and grouping on any view or report.

Alternatively, you could use tags to categorize on other criteria such as team, projects, support level, urgency, size, difficulty, etc.

Resource Allocation

People

That is very easy since Teamhood’s primary focus is people and their work. Just make sure tasks are properly assigned and/or scheduled. This way, you will be able to leverage the Workload view to understand how busy your team is and when you have the capacity for new projects.

Machinery

For non-human resources such as instruments or machinery, we recommend using tags. This way you will be able to report on machinery resources via Workload view as well. Just select “Group by Tag” in the ‘Customize’ menu.

Time Tracking

Time sheets

If your employees will perform time-tracking activities in Teamhood due to its easy and integrated time tracker, you will most likely use Timesheets to report that time. Things we discussed in the first section about structure will come in handy if you will need to filter by board or tag to present a certain set of data.

Cost tracking

You can set hourly rates for each individual contributor and the Timesheet report will calculate the total cost based on that rate and time tracked.

Reporting

You can create custom Dashboards for each board (client, project group, or team). Visualize progress, list blockers or overdue work, create quick checklists for this week’s work, and more. If required, you can share these dashboards with each client separately by providing the secure link.

Custom Fields

Teamhood comes with a predefined selection of work item fields. However, you are not limited to only using those. You can create your own custom field to hold any additional information that is key to your project. Learn more about custom fields here.