Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

August 2022

Learn how to combat these challenges and become a more profitable agency

Do you wish your agency was actually profitable but don't know where to start? We get it, agencies face many challenges and it can be hard to look past the numbers and instead focus on the smaller steps you can take to help your agency become more profitable. Agency owners know that they must continue to grow and improve because even if you were profitable last year, that doesn't guarantee the same for the future.

12 Best Formstack Alternatives Of 2022 (Free + Paid)

Before investing in any software tool for your business, you must explore various alternative options in the market. Having a look at different alternatives gives you an idea of whether investing in the tool is worth it or if there are better options available. This goes for all software solutions, including Formstack. Formstack is a well-known and reliable tool trusted by over 25,000 organizations, including startups and Fortune 500 companies.

Product Delivery Strategy Guide For Project Managers

Business goals are always fixed by the level of your ability to plan the marketing strategy. No matter how useful your product is, if you don’t have an effective product strategy it will eventually lead you to a filled warehouse and zero revenue. It is pointless to implement various strategies in today’s world and environment without first understanding their effects and advantages.

What is Backlog Grooming & How to optimize Team Performance with Backlog Management?

Product development teams, whether using Scrum or Kanban, require a range of tools to be productive. That is the goal of backlog grooming: to maintain product development systematized and seamless. Below, we dig deep into the strategy’s benefits and best practices, including how to execute successful backlog refinement meetings to guarantee a strong product team. Continue reading to improve team structure and meeting activities.

Why Is Project Prioritization Matrix Important To Agile Teams?

Project management is a tricky business. Even with abundant resources and a good team, executing a project without a sound and relevant workflow design is the perfect recipe for failure. In contrast, good and practical project management almost always pays off. It is a curious case as to what exactly makes a good and practical managing style excellent and valuable. Is it the team or perhaps the vision?

Subtractive Productivity: Doing Less To Get More Done

When it comes to getting things done, most people think the best way to be productive is to do as much as possible. But what if there was another way? What if you could actually get more done by doing less? It may sound counterintuitive, but it’s true – and it’s called subtractive productivity. In this blog post, we’ll look at what subtractive productivity is and how you can use it to boost your productivity and achieve your goals.

Three security tactics for every IT leader to consider this fall

Raise your hand if you know someone who’s fallen for a phishing scam. The ordeal often requires a few hours, several emails to tech support to regain control of the account, and finally, the reversal of credit card charges. Now imagine this happening to a colleague’s work email address. As an IT professional, you might have onboarded them into the company’s network, trained them on best practices, and worked with them regularly in the past.

8 Most Essential Agency Management Software For An All-Star Marketing Firm

Efficient marketing operations are a mix of strategic planning, outreach, communication, teamwork, and much more. Managing all these elements manually could be challenging, especially for agencies that run campaigns for multiple clients simultaneously. As a result, marketing agencies need specialized software tools to streamline and optimize their operations. Such agency management software can help them serve more clients without a massive team and improve profitability.

5-step internal communications strategy: Reducing the chaos of how teams talk

Anyone who played the telephone game as a kid knows the importance of accurate communication. It may sound dramatic, but being able to accurately and thoroughly communicate with team members may be the difference between companies reaching their goals and going out of business. Workplace communication has always posed a struggle, and the challenges have increased with the recent rise of remote work.

8 Most Essential Agency Management Software For An All-Star Marketing Firm

Efficient marketing operations are a mix of strategic planning, outreach, communication, teamwork, and much more. Managing all these elements manually could be challenging, especially for agencies that run campaigns for multiple clients simultaneously. As a result, marketing agencies need specialized software tools to streamline and optimize their operations. Such agency management software can help them serve more clients without a massive team and improve profitability.

6 Best Project Manager Certifications to Make You Job Ready

Nowadays, getting ahead in your job and career often requires having the proper certifications. This is especially true for project managers, who must ensure that projects are completed on time, within budget, and to the required standards. While becoming a project manager does require some natural ability and experience, having the proper project manager certifications can make a big difference in your career.

Hybrid Work Schedule: 2 Models That Work (+ 5 Best Practices)

The Covid-19 pandemic saw employees enjoy the flexibility of remote work, with many reluctant to return to full-time on-site work modes. However, not all work can be done remotely. Fortunately, you can have the best of both with hybrid work schedules! A hybrid work schedule combines on-site and remote work modes. It lowers infrastructural costs, reduces absenteeism, and increases employee engagement — ultimately boosting your company’s productivity.

Scoro Awarded Twice in Software Reviews Data Quadrant Awards

SoftwareReviews has published its Project Management Data Quadrant Awards, naming Scoro as an industry leader in 2022. Across the quadrant report, Scoro has been awarded Gold Medal in Project Portfolio Management – Mid-Market and named a “Champion” in Project Management – Mid-Market.

Time Doctor | Get better together

Time Doctor is a work insights company that tracks and analyzes how companies use their time to provide clear direction on how to improve performance and productivity. We believe the best organizations continuously improve by making informed decisions with accurate data. Measuring and analyzing how we spend our time uncovers the insights that empower everyone to improve their performance, wherever they work.

Your guide to project management offices (PMOs)

Project management is nothing new for your business: You already rely on project managers to keep the deliverables moving, break down information silos, and work toward project success. But as your business grows, you may reach a point where having a handful of project managers working as peers isn’t enough. There are a few telltale signs that you’ve reached this point: A project management office could be the solution to these and other issues.

How to Survive Inflation: Boost Your Salary and Protect Your Money

Inflation is a scary word for many people. It can mean the difference between having a comfortable life and struggling to make ends meet. For people who are already struggling, inflation can be disastrous. Luckily, there are things you can do to protect yourself from inflation and boost your salary during these unstable times. In this blog post, we will discuss some of the best ways to survive inflation and keep your money safe!

7 powerful project planning tools for more effective workflows

No matter which methodology project managers subscribe to, they know they need to organize and execute tasks proactively and efficiently. They don’t just wake up one day with all facets of a project ready to roll. It takes planning, planning, and more planning. Project management tools make a manager’s job easier and more productive, and a project’s planning stage gets a major boost from project planning tools.

Asana vs Monday: More Powerful Collaboration Tool for the Era of Remote Work

Remote workers face many challenges, but the most pressing one is the lack of clear structure in communication and collaboration processes. Asana and monday.com are two popular tools trying to bring some discipline into this otherwise very fluid world. Both platforms offer top-notch features and tools to help remote teams with collaborating, tracking, and managing work. But which of them is right for you?

10 Ways to Get Your Team to Respect Deadlines

Not meeting a deadline is not a death or life issue, but indeed it makes everything very complicated. Deadlines exist for a reason as they ensure that work is completed on time and that everyone is aware of what needs to be done and happy at the end of the day! Unfortunately, many employees do not take deadlines seriously, which can cause problems for the team as a whole. In this blog post, we will discuss 10 ways to get your team to respect deadlines.

Project Management Triangle: All You Need To Know

Project managers play a pivotal role in an organization. Right from planning and executing a roadmap to handling a team and ensuring successful project completion while maintaining high-quality output within a given budget and time, project managers take care of everything. A project’s time, scope, and cost are the main constraints that managers need to balance to ensure success.

Adding the Customer Apps to your Website

OneDesk includes multiple customer-facing apps that you can use to enable communication with your customers. The apps include the web widget, messenger, portal, knowledgebase and webforms. Each app provides channels for customers, clients, or end-users to receive support or collaborate with your team. The web widget is an icon displayed on your site which allows easy access to the other apps. The messenger is a live chat application between your agents and customers.

11 project management tips to boost productivity

The project management field keeps growing, and the demands on project managers keep growing, too. The great thing about project management is that there’s always room to improve workflows: You can always find new efficiencies, eliminate waste, and implement stronger tools and workflows. People come into project management in all sorts of ways. You may be a new project manager, or maybe you’re just considering getting into the field.

3 Ways Nifty Transformed the Automotive Industry for This Startup

Nifty has been the versatile Swiss army knife for an automotive tech start-up, Schmicko. They specialize in professional mobile car care services, held together tightly with smart technology, starting with Nifty. With so many moving parts of the business, from onsite technical services to customer service, marketing, and so on, it becomes incredibly easy to get caught up in daily activities instead of the ‘main objectives’.

How much should you charge for your services? A quick guide to profitability

Let’s face it, you didn’t start an agency because you’re obsessed with numbers. But whether you like it or not, understanding your business and how to set yourself (and your team!) up for success often starts with and comes down to numbers.

Want to survive a pandemic pivot? How one company pulled off a dramatic reinvention.

Just before the holidays in 2021, the marketing team at Mural was met with the most brow-furrowing of work problems: Company leaders presented them with an abstract-sounding challenge and gave them a hard deadline to figure it out. Mural was going to complete its first acquisition in its 10-year history and establish a new market category. But how does one launch a new category? And what is this new category? How does one communicate that positive transformation to customers?

How to Use eNPS for Employee Acquisition and Retention

Getting new employees is expensive and takes up a lot of time and resources. Hiring a new employee costs on average $4000, according to Glassdoor. Additionally, the U.S. is currently suffering from the Great Resignation, an unprecedented amount of workers leaving their jobs. For that reason, it is important to try and retain as many of your current employees as possible. You will probably also face the challenge of hiring new talents. It is not easy, and you need all the help you can get.

What's New in Asana | August 2022

Welcome to the August edition of What’s New in Asana! First, start your work week off strong by setting a weekly focus on Asana’s mobile app. Your focus stays visible on My Tasks and helps you prioritize your most important work. Next, our improved Google Drive integration helps you keep conversations about work all in one place. Now you can get notifications on tasks in Asana when someone comments on an attached Google file. This ensures open comments are actioned and work doesn’t slip through the cracks.

Building an initial pricing strategy 101: Agency edition

Figuring out what to charge for products is challenging. Determining what to charge for services is even harder. And when those services are both creative and wide-ranging — like they are at your agency — getting pricing just right can feel downright maddening. In this guide, we’ll show you what you need to know as you develop an initial pricing strategy for your agency, along with 14 strategies businesses across a spectrum of industries use to set their pricing.

Understanding the Iterative Process: 5 Steps To Success

Whether you are just starting out in your project management career or are a seasoned pro, it is essential to understand the iterative process. This process is commonly used in software development but can be applied to any project – sometimes even a personal one. An iterative process is an approach to problem-solving that involves breaking down a significant problem into smaller, more manageable pieces.

When to hire an employee: Signs it's time to grow your agency

You’ve been running your agency with a small but mighty team, and it's been working out for you…or so you think. How do you know when it's not? Agencies can get used to running lean out of pure necessity, stuck in survival mode while efficiency, profitability, and employee happiness suffer–and don’t have to! But the thought of hiring help can seem like a bigger burden than a simple solution.

OneDesk - Webinar: Setup & Configure Your Automation Workflow

A webinar explaining the different automations in OneDesk. Differences between automated messages, email templates, and automated workflows. Explains some of the default automations, how to edit and create new automations. OneDesk combines Help Desk & Project Management software into a single application. OneDesk also includes customer-facing applications: real-time chat, customizable webforms, and a customer portal. These integrated applications allow you to serve your customers while conveniently working on your projects in one platform.

11 Best No-Code Software For Small Business

Years ago, programmers were a necessity to run and manage a tech-forward company. But these days, advancements in technology has given everyone an equal chance at the computer table. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an entrepreneur, a virtual assistant, or a marketing manager, you can automate and simplify workflows without even writing a single line of code. It’s not hard to understand why no-code software are rapidly gaining traction among small businesses.

8 useful tips to keep your project management process organized

Project managers know the success or failure of a plan rests primarily on their shoulders — that’s why staying focused and organized is critical. Keeping team members on task, handling the inevitable issues that rear their ugly heads, and moving the project forward so the deliverables are completed on time takes more than luck and skill. Project success depends on how well you stay organized. There are dozens, or hundreds, of ideas and methodologies for staying organized.

10 Ways to Keep Yourself Safe from Layoffs

Nobody wants to get laid off. It’s a challenging process that can often lead to great stress and uncertainty. If you’re worried about layoffs at your job, don’t worry – we’re here to help! This blog post will go through 10 ways to ensure your job is secure and minimize the danger of losing it. Keep reading for more information!

OneDesk - Getting Started: Mobile App | Mobile Help Desk & Task Management

Log tickets & tasks, update progress, reply to customers, and collaborate with your team with the mobile OneDesk app. This video covers the basics of using the mobile app. OneDesk combines Help Desk & Project Management software into a single application. OneDesk also includes customer-facing applications: real-time chat, customizable webforms, and a customer portal. These integrated applications allow you to serve your customers while conveniently working on your projects in one platform.

A comprehensive guide on project resource management

Project planning is one critical component of project success. But projects don’t happen in a vacuum: To get any project work done, an organization needs people to do the work, materials from which to build the product, and money to pay for the entire operation. This is where resource management enters the picture. It goes a step beyond project management and proactively manages all resources required to successfully complete a project.

15 tips to cut your business costs

As a business owner, you are always looking for ways to be more efficient and productive. But what about ways to cut the expenses of your business? You can do many simple things to reduce your business expenses and keep more money in your pocket. We have 15 tips to help you save money on your business expenses. So read on and start saving!

August Update: Improved Cost Tracking Scoro

Accurately tracking your costs helps you determine what’s eating away at your profit margin. With this update, we are introducing the much-anticipated retrospective cost linking option, so you can track and manage project-related costs at the most granular level. In addition, we’ve improved Scoro’s export options and polished up a few things on the task management side.

Top 7 Marketing Tech Trends Every Company Must Follow

You must have sent customized emails, made appealing UI/UX, or offered prizes and discounts to draw users’ attention. The user experience might have been made more engaging by gamification or offered an infinite number of options for users to use. And there are many other things you do that you believe will help you make more sales and bring in more money. Right? But what ultimately evolves?