The latest News and Information on Project Management, Methodologies, Productivity and Tools.
No project manager can handle everything alone. They need the power of product management tools by their side to get things done faster, smarter, and optimally. If you are looking to add a robust suite of product management software tools to add to your tech stack, this guide is for you. We will deep-dive into some of the most powerful product management tools you can leverage and don multiple hats like a pro!
We recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Marcel Petitpas, Co-Founder and CEO of Parakeeto, to unpick his surefire time-tracking framework for agencies. If you’re an agency leader who has ripped up your time-tracking methodology and thrown it out the proverbial window (let’s face it, who hasn’t?) then this blog is for you. Time-tracking is notoriously difficult to get right, but with Marcel’s guidance and the right tools in place, it really doesn’t have to be.
Do your employees always seem to be working hard, yet their total billable hours remain low? Tracking your employee utilization rate is essential for service providers that need to optimize resources and improve profitability. Not monitoring this metric means you could be doing a lot of work without many client deliverables or billable hours to show for it. How do you calculate this rate and keep it as high as possible?
A perceived lack of fair or competitive compensation is a major reason for employee turnover, and ‘compensation’ includes more than a person’s take-home pay packet. It pays to understand the varied ways you can compensate employees—including comp time—and how to do so while staying within the law.
The stats about email marketing ROI seem almost too good to be true: $36 for every $1 spent is a heck of a return. But results like those don’t happen simply by deciding to send a few sporadic marketing emails. They happen when you send the right emails to the right people at the right time, pushing them to the right outcomes.
If you’ve tried RACI models for clarifying responsibilities in your marketing project management efforts, did you get the results you were hoping for? For some agencies, RACI delivers incredible clarity. But others find it a little underwhelming, vague, or even confusing. Divvying up project roles into four categories (responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed) is one way to bring clarity to a project.
Does it ever feel like following an agile approach isn’t as, well, agile as it’s supposed to be? For all the advantages agile delivers, there are trade-offs. And sometimes, the framework ends up getting in the way of business agility. Some are turning to a hybrid approach in an effort to achieve better adaptability — and greater agility — throughout the delivery lifecycle. This hybrid approach is a scaled agile framework called Disciplined Agile.
Did you know that businesses waste $1 million every 20 seconds because of poor project performance? It’s a staggering number for sure, and for growth-focused agencies especially, it’s a statistic to avoid becoming a part of. That’s where lean thinking comes into play: to help agencies avoid waste and inefficiencies and keep projects more streamlined and profitable.
With a laser-like focus on eliminating waste through continuous improvement, it’s easy to see why lean project management has caught on even outside its manufacturing origins. Today, lean has become one of the leading styles of project management across software development, marketing, manufacturing, and more. Companies ranging from Intel to John Deere to Nike have implemented lean manufacturing and seen powerful results.
