Does it ever feel like there’s just too much project and not enough budget? (Does it ever not feel that way?) It’s not just you — only 34% of businesses report completing projects on budget half the time or better. In other words, most businesses (66% of them) go over budget on more than half the projects they complete. Project managers are constantly concerned with project planning, timelines, forecasting, and even risk management.

What’s your definition of project success? Delivering a project on time and on budget, right? That answer gets us most of the way there, but it falls about 33% short. For a project to be successful, it needs three qualities, not two. In addition to being on time and on budget, the project also has to reach the level of quality necessary to fulfill the project objectives.

Everyone, everywhere, wants a good deal — and good quality. We want a bargain at the car lot, but not on a lemon that won’t survive the drive home. We don’t want to pay $20 for bananas at the grocery store, but we don’t want half-rotten ones swarmed by fruit flies either. We want good quality at the best price. In business, balancing price and quality can get complicated. The things we buy or contract for are complex and nuanced, and so are their procurement processes.

If you're doing any sort of client work, chances are you know the pains of onboarding new clients. There may even be times when you've sent them one of those generic questionnaires that asks about everything under the sun. Bored, the client loses interest, filling out the form with the most perfunctory answers so they can get through it ASAP. Ask yourself: is anyone happy about this? Enter Conditional Logic, a revolution in form creation that adjusts in real time based on your clients' answers.

Burn-up charts are just one tool in the project manager’s toolbox — but these humble charts can be impressively effective. They’re perfect for presenting a quick snapshot of project progress, as well as showing progress over time or the ways a project’s scope keeps shifting. The burn-up chart is well worth understanding and adding to your arsenal. So let’s take a look at what a burn-up chart actually is and how to make your own.

Change is unavoidable — but that doesn’t make it easy. Clients change their minds, industries evolve, and business trends pop up fast and fade away just as quickly. The longer you work in and around projects, the more you see how easy it is for changes to delay or even derail a project. To get a handle on project changes, many client services organizations adopt a formal or informal system of change request management.

As an agency leader, do you ever feel pulled in opposite directions? That’s a real possibility when it comes to requests for proposal (RFPs). An RFP solicits proposals for services, usually on projects with multiple facets, phases, or deliverables. Agencies can be on both the giving and receiving end of the RFP process. For example, a business might create an RFP for a comprehensive marketing campaign, including commercials.

RFIs, RFPs, RFQs: we know, it’s an acronym overload. But for many agencies, documents like these are core to their sales and operations processes. Like it or not, the “RFs” are a part of how business gets done. But all this alphabet soup can get a little nebulous. If you aren’t working with them every day (and maybe even if you are), it’s easy to lose track of what each document is there for. What exactly is an RFI, and when should your agency use one?

It may sound like something out of a science fiction film, but the phase-gate process is a project management methodology that can offer a lot of benefits. It helps project teams break large projects down into checkpoints and milestones to ensure quality and viability before moving on to the next development phase. Of course, there’s no shortage of project management methodologies for client services businesses to choose from.