“What are you working on?” Wait, what happened with our budget? Why’s this late again?” Sound familiar? Most of the time, poor planning is the root of your project management headaches. But if you stick to a work plan, the status of your projects doesn’t have to be a wild guess. This is especially true when you’re juggling multiple, long-term projects with a bunch of different stakeholders. Thing is, poor planning still ranks among the top challenges of PMs today.

As a project manager, you’re constantly juggling responsibilities like keeping team members focused, creating achievable schedules, task management, project deadlines, wayward stakeholders, and not to mention the overall project management communication plans. Take a breath because it's a challenging role in any organization. Have you ever wondered what sets successful project managers apart from the rest? Are the best just really good at convincing team members to meet project deadlines?

Project management is the ultimate tool for disproving all the worst stereotypes about creative teams. It helps us to be immaculately organized. It makes our work more quantifiable. The reality is that many creative people are great organizers and communicators and can work in simpatico with non-creative clients. But project management goes further by systemically enabling a clear and organized approach to work.

Scope creep: It’s an ever-present threat for project teams, a bogeyman lurking behind every decision, threatening to delay or even derail your current project. For project managers, scope creep is especially frustrating. It almost always seems to be due to someone else’s decision — one that’s outside of your control or that you don’t even know about until it’s too late. Yet it’s you, the project manager, that usually gets blamed for any project delays.

At its simplest, Slack is a channel-based chat tool that many agencies and client services teams use to discuss issues in real-time. Instead of relying on buried email threads, phone calls, or carrier pigeons, Slack has become a popular tool for one-to-one business messaging, private group chat, voice and video calls, and inter-business collaboration via Slack Connect.

You don’t have to be a project manager to experience the challenges that come with handling projects from start to finish. Owners and agency leaders, like you, run into project management challenges on a regular. And it doesn’t matter if you’re large enough to have in-house project managers or handle those functions yourself. Things happen – projects run off course, over budget, or exhaust your most valuable resources.

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be one of the biggest contributing factors to online success. There's a reason why SEO is one of the most sought-after services by businesses and has an expected $83.7 billion market reach by 2025. If you appear higher in search results of a competitive keyword, you get more site visits. And increased site visits expand brand awareness, boost credibility, and lead to more conversions. A well-planned SEO campaign is your best chance of getting to No.

We have some exciting new updates for you this month! See the latest features released in Teamwork throughout February such as a sneak peek into a brand new look coming to Teamwork, a Google Sheets Integration, and our new Desk Mobile App!

Over the past several years, Microsoft Teams has burst onto the scene as a powerful (and powerfully integrated) collaboration platform within Microsoft 365. Companies already paying for Office 365 or Microsoft 365 gain access to the app for no additional cost, and it’s exceptionally well integrated with the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite.

No matter how you slice or dice it, project managers encounter plenty of repetitive work when handling their various projects and tasks. With so much time tied up in manual processes, task management quickly turns into a task of its own. Whether it’s recreating tasks or reassigning duties, projects with similar structures, teams, or timelines require a lot of duplicate actions. But you shouldn’t have to spend that excess time on duplicate work!

HubSpot is a powerful CRM and suite of digital marketing tools that thousands of companies use to coordinate their digital marketing and customer relationship efforts. It’s a highly versatile platform, but of course, it doesn’t do everything your business needs to do. Many of the other tools you rely on (project management software, for one) need to access information within HubSpot or interact with it in some way.