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.

Project management software comes in a lot of shapes and sizes — and some are nicer than others. If you want to give your project team the tools they need to excel, choosing the right type of software should be your number one objective. One type of software that can help with almost all aspects of project management is a project management information system (PMIS).

What are you assuming right this second? Lots of things! At a minimum: We all make assumptions about the world around us — it’s a part of navigating a complex and sometimes chaotic world. What good would we be in everyday life if we constantly doubted that gravity would hold us down, that electricity would keep working, and so on? We do the same thing in projects: we make certain project assumptions so we can focus on the less certain stuff between those assumptions.