Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Every agency ops leader eventually hits the same wall. A deal closes in HubSpot. Someone copies the client details into a spreadsheet. Another person builds the project manually, and by the time delivery starts, three days have passed and half the context is missing. That gap between "sold" and "started" is where client relationships quietly erode.

You already live in Microsoft Teams. Your standups happen there, your files live there, and your quick "can you check this?" messages fly through it dozens of times a day. So when project work starts falling through the cracks, the instinct is obvious: find a project management app that plugs right into Teams. The problem? Microsoft Teams surpassed 250 million monthly active users as of 2021, according to Statista, and has continued growing since.

A few years back, I was managing six client accounts at once with a stack of tools that didn't talk to each other. Time tracking in one app, project tasks in another, and a spreadsheet held together by hope to figure out whether any of it was actually profitable. That setup cost us hours every week in manual reconciliation, and we still missed billing for work that fell through the cracks.

Before joining Teamwork.com, I spent years running delivery at agency firms. Back then, "PSA" meant either an overpriced system nobody wanted to use or a Frankenstein stack of spreadsheets and disconnected apps. The ticketing tool didn't talk to the billing tool. The billing tool didn't talk to the project tracker. And the project tracker was, let's be honest, a shared Google Sheet held together by hope.

Professional services teams are often convinced they have a "people problem" when what they really have is a visibility problem. Tasks scattered across three tools, time logged in a spreadsheet nobody checks, and deadlines that only surface when a client emails asking for an update. Before I joined Teamwork.com, I spent years managing client projects at agencies where this was just how things worked. Monday mornings started with a 45-minute standup that could have been a dashboard.

These three small but mighty updates we shipped in June are here to make working in Teamwork.com that much easier.

Every agency runs on time. Whether you bill hourly, use retainers, or run fixed-fee projects, knowing where your team's hours actually go is the difference between profitable delivery and slow-motion margin erosion. Before I joined Teamwork.com, I spent years at agencies wrestling with exactly this problem: timesheets submitted days late, hours logged to the wrong project, and month-end reviews that felt more like forensic accounting than business management.

Every stakeholder report I've written that actually changed a decision had one thing in common: it was built for the person reading it, not the person writing it. That sounds obvious, but in practice, most professional services teams default to a single report template and blast it to everyone from the CEO to the client contact. The result? Leadership skims for the one number they care about. Clients get anxious about details that don't concern them.

Every agile team I've been part of has gone through the same cycle with metrics. Someone proposes tracking velocity. Someone else adds cycle time. A third person builds a dashboard with fifteen charts. Within two months, nobody looks at any of them. The problem is not a lack of data. It's a lack of clarity about what decisions the data should inform.

Here's a number that still stops me mid-conversation: 57% of agency professionals spend more time reporting on work than doing the actual work. That's from our Sprint to AI report, and every time I share it, the response is the same slow nod of recognition. I've lived that reality.