Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

There's a question that consulting leaders don't ask themselves enough: if AI created 10% more delivery capacity in your teams tomorrow, would you actually know where to deploy it? That provocation sat at the heart of the session I ran at Leaders in Consultancy Munich, and judging by the room, it landed.

Teams are often busy, but that doesn’t always mean work is moving forward. Delays caused by unclear priorities, repeated approvals, manual status updates, and scattered communication can slow even the best projects. Lean project management helps teams deliver more value by removing the work that doesn’t contribute to the final outcome. Instead of asking people to work faster, it focuses on improving workflow, reducing waste, and making project delivery more predictable.

You already live in Microsoft Teams. Your standups happen there, your files live there, and your quick "can you check this?" messages fly through it dozens of times a day. So when project work starts falling through the cracks, the instinct is obvious: find a project management app that plugs right into Teams. The problem? Microsoft Teams surpassed 250 million monthly active users as of 2021, according to Statista, and has continued growing since.

Every agency ops leader eventually hits the same wall. A deal closes in HubSpot. Someone copies the client details into a spreadsheet. Another person builds the project manually, and by the time delivery starts, three days have passed and half the context is missing. That gap between "sold" and "started" is where client relationships quietly erode.

A Project Manager is the professional responsible for planning, coordinating, and delivering a project on time, within budget, and according to the agreed scope. They oversee people, processes, timelines, and resources to ensure projects achieve their intended goals while minimizing risks and keeping stakeholders informed.

A few years back, I was managing six client accounts at once with a stack of tools that didn't talk to each other. Time tracking in one app, project tasks in another, and a spreadsheet held together by hope to figure out whether any of it was actually profitable. That setup cost us hours every week in manual reconciliation, and we still missed billing for work that fell through the cracks.

Before joining Teamwork.com, I spent years running delivery at agency firms. Back then, "PSA" meant either an overpriced system nobody wanted to use or a Frankenstein stack of spreadsheets and disconnected apps. The ticketing tool didn't talk to the billing tool. The billing tool didn't talk to the project tracker. And the project tracker was, let's be honest, a shared Google Sheet held together by hope.