Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

I get invited to compete against custom builds almost every week now. Not against competitor vendors. Against a team of developers, or increasingly against an AI coding tool and a founder who is good with prompts. It usually starts the same way. A services firm has a workflow that no off-the-shelf product covers perfectly. So they get a quote from a dev shop, or they spin up a build themselves over a weekend.

Every professional services team I've been part of has had the same argument at some point: "Why aren't timesheets getting done?" Before I joined Teamwork.com, I spent years managing delivery for agency teams. The answer was always the same. Manual time tracking is painful, so people avoid it. Automated time tracking fixes the root cause by removing the manual work entirely. This guide breaks down how it works, what methods are available, and how to choose an approach that actually sticks with your team.

I spent the best part of a decade in client services, and have seen firsthand how resource planning can make or break your team and projects. If there is one thing I have learned, it is that most project delays do not start with bad estimates or unclear scope. They start with a resource plan that looks fine on paper but falls apart the moment two projects need the same person on the same day.

A project that finishes on time isn't automatically a project that performed well. I've seen plenty of "green status" projects that quietly burned through margin, overloaded the team, and left the client underwhelmed. Without a reference point, you can't tell the difference between a genuinely healthy project and one that just crossed the finish line.

I spent a day in New York with agency leaders, operators, and industry experts at OPERATE'26, Teamwork.com's inaugural Agency Leaders Summit. The conversations covered scaling, profitability, AI, talent, and leadership. But the strongest takeaway wasn't fear about the future. It was optimism. Here's what the day kept coming back to.

Scope creep doesn't announce itself. It shows up as "a small tweak" here and "one more round of revisions" there. By the time you notice, the project that was supposed to be profitable is bleeding money. I've spent years managing projects inside professional services firms and now at Teamwork.com. The pattern is always the same: small, untracked additions that seem harmless but collectively eat the entire margin.

Growth looks exciting from the boardroom. More customers. More revenue. More headcount. More opportunity. But for the people responsible for turning strategy into reality, growth feels very different. It feels like communication breaking down. Managers becoming stretched. Processes that once worked suddenly collapsing under the weight of scale. Customers experiencing the impact before leadership dashboards ever reveal a problem.

Jira was built for software developers. If you're running client projects, managing budgets, or tracking billable time, you've probably felt the friction. The tool that powers sprint boards brilliantly can make a simple client status update feel like configuring a space shuttle.

We're always looking for ways to make the work you do in Teamwork.com feel simpler. Over the past year, one theme that has consistently appeared in customer conversations, product research, and your direct feedback? Task Details—one of the most heavily used areas of Teamwork.com—can sometimes feel busy, overwhelming, and maybe even a little cluttered at times.

Project planning rarely starts with task assignment locked in. You know the work that needs to happen, but the exact people? That often comes later. Until now, tasks in Teamwork.com required you to assign work to a specific user or team from the start. That created friction during early-stage planning, especially when task assignment decisions were still evolving.