When you’re working as part of a large agency, many teams discover that meeting strict deadlines can be much more difficult than in smaller businesses.
Situations like this can cause pressure to easily mount up on a project manager - especially when there are multiple priorities to meet at varying timescales.
Some of the key reasons behind agencies missing deadlines is due to poor planning and time management. Particularly on projects that require multiple people’s time, issues can arise at the last moment and disrupt the flow of work. For this reason, it’s important to plan far in advance and allow breathing space for any potential hiccups.
Having many people involved in each task often spurs the dilemma of having ‘too many cooks’. However, to ease the problem and ensure that your team are working to tight deadlines, you can use the following techniques:
Use a project planning app
The simplest way to avoid missing deadlines as a large agency is to use a project planning app. This will allow all members of your team to share deadlines and schedules, allowing them to have full visibility on where the tasks are up to at any one time.
Sharing a person’s schedule can act as a ‘public deadline’, giving them more encouragement and motivation to get their work done on time. It can also help other staff pick-up the slack in instances where a member of the team isn’t on target to complete their task.
Give crucial control for the project manager
When using this kind of management app, any client projects that you have in the pipeline are visible to all employees. They’re also able to tick off tasks when completed, which allows the project manager to have crucial control and the ability to see when, where and why any projects are overrunning.
An integral piece of software will allow the project manager to hold these individuals to account before the issue causes a problem. In this case, it’ll prevent the chances of your agency repeatedly missing deadlines for your clients due to poor time management.
Hold regular face-to-face meetings
Another method for ensuring that your workforce meets deadlines is to hold regular face-to-face meetings. By regularly discussing your client’s projects and documenting the notes afterwards, everybody can be clear on the tasks required, and the importance of working to the deadline.
People can also ask questions in these meetings if they’re unsure about their personal tasks or the project as a whole. This can prevent them wasting time and making mistakes that need to be corrected later.
Break down large tasks
Especially true for projects that bring in a large amount of revenue for your agency, big tasks can look overwhelming for employees. Not only could this result in people becoming unproductive, but it could be a leading cause for missing your client’s deadlines.
You can prevent this from becoming an issue by breaking down large tasks into smaller ones. If possible, assign the smaller tasks for different people on alternate days to maintain your staff’s interest and motivation for working to deadlines.
As you can see, managing a large team of people doesn’t mean your agency has to continually miss deadlines. In fact, when you’ve got more eyes on a shared timeline of your client’s projects, there should be a better chance of your agency getting the work done on time, every time!