To succeed as an agency — or a business of any kind — you need a clear vision of what success looks like. Is success more revenue? More clients? Higher customer satisfaction? A Super Bowl ad? All of the above? Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a time-tested way to measure performance and the success that strong performance generates. Tracking KPIs is also a part of project management best practices.

50 million users can’t be wrong: Trello is a great way to manage work and projects… until it isn’t. Launched in 2011, Trello took the project management scene by storm with a refreshingly simple approach to keeping track of work. And for small teams and lightweight workflows, Trello still has a lot to offer. The only problem? Teams and projects aren’t always small and lightweight.

Researchers expect growth in the DevOps market to reach a whopping $25.5 billion by 2028, so now is a great time to learn what it takes to execute an efficient DevOps project. Understanding how to build a DevOps pipeline is a crucial first step. If pipelines exist to move things forward, a DevOps pipeline is about moving software projects forward from one process to the next.

"Currently, DevOps is more like a philosophical movement, not yet a precise collection of practices, descriptive or prescriptive." Like abstract art or that indie movie your quirky friend made you watch, the DevOps methodology is one that is largely open to interpretation. Nevertheless, there is still a range of principles and best practices that DevOps engineers and project managers need to be aware of.

We’ve all heard it before: “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” When Alan Lakein said this back in the 1970s, he may not have been talking specifically about media planning — but the shoe absolutely fits. Media planning (the process of determining when, where, and how frequently to run ads for an organization across which media and channels) is nothing if not a bit chaotic. There are so many parts and pieces going into simply creating the media.

You and your team need great software to manage your work. But great project management software needs to keep up not only with your team but also with market changes. Over the past five years, a new method of project management, called Agile, has responded to the demand for a more adaptive and evolutionary project management process. It does little good to adopt the Agile method while still using software that bogs down or complicates your projects.

Not a fan of meetings? You aren’t the only one. Lencioni is right: In many cases, meetings are both boring and unnecessary — a double whammy. They don’t necessarily help your agency accomplish its goals and drive growth. That’s why we recommend replacing all of your meetings (okay, maybe not all, but most of them) with a project management app instead. A smooth project management system helps your agency work efficiently and effectively.

Nothing can slow down the work you do for clients more than the approval process. Whether you’re going back and forth between various iterations because feedback was unclear, or chasing down a client to get final sign-off, it can be a huge time waste that often results in missed deadlines or less-than-stellar work. Enter proofs, the latest (and most requested!) feature we’re excited to roll out at Teamwork.

As a project manager, you’re constantly juggling responsibilities like keeping team members focused, creating achievable schedules, task management, project deadlines, and wayward stakeholders, not to mention the overall project management communication plan. Take a breath. 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?

We originally posted this blog back in 2016, but now that we’re a little older and wiser, we thought it was time to revisit it. As a company, we’re now over a decade old, and this year our founders Peter and Daniel won the prestigious EOY Entrepreneur(s) of the Year award (yay!). So it’s probably safe to say we’re not exactly a startup anymore. But we were. And it taught us some of the most important lessons we needed to know in order to get to where we are today.