Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

There's a Reddit thread that's currently ranking for this exact topic, and the whole premise is that project profitability is "basically a guess." I get why people feel that way. But forecasting profit before you start isn't fortune-telling, it's a repeatable calculation you can run on any project in about an hour. This guide walks through the five-step method I used in my agency days to predict a project's margin before a single hour is logged.

Before I joined Teamwork.com, I directed client accounts at agencies, and the most uncomfortable meeting of every month was the profitability review. We'd pull time out of one tool, costs out of another, and rates out of a spreadsheet someone updated when they remembered to. By the time the numbers lined up, the project was already over, and so was any chance to fix it. That's the real problem with most "profitability tracking." It tells you what happened after you can't do anything about it.

Manual onboarding is a mess waiting to happen. Documents slip through the cracks, tasks get missed, accounts aren’t ready on day one and the result is a disjointed experience that frustrates HR and underwhelms your new hires. It’s not just inefficient; it’s a bad first impression. Automation changes that. With the right tools, you can turn a scattered process into a smooth, repeatable system that’s faster, more reliable, and easier to scale.

There's a question that consulting leaders don't ask themselves enough: if AI created 10% more delivery capacity in your teams tomorrow, would you actually know where to deploy it? That provocation sat at the heart of the session I ran at Leaders in Consultancy Munich, and judging by the room, it landed.

Teams are often busy, but that doesn’t always mean work is moving forward. Delays caused by unclear priorities, repeated approvals, manual status updates, and scattered communication can slow even the best projects. Lean project management helps teams deliver more value by removing the work that doesn’t contribute to the final outcome. Instead of asking people to work faster, it focuses on improving workflow, reducing waste, and making project delivery more predictable.

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.