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The Engagement 4Cast
Project management often centers on the ‘iron triangle’ constraints of scope, time, and budget. At 4Site, our project managers go further, integrating people, processes, and tools to produce exceptional work through creative operations.
Over the past 15 years, we’ve created a creative operations framework that drives excellence in our work with nonprofits. While the details are tailored to our services and clients, it’s grounded in four key pillars any organization can use to elevate their work.
Our project managers go further, integrating people, processes, and tools to produce exceptional work.
When people hear the words “administration” or “management,” it often has a negative connotation, like “bureaucracy.” Many organizations, fueled by big ambitions and limited budgets, often look to gain efficiency by trying to reduce this overhead. But that’s a mistake.
When teams from two or more organizations come together to complete a project, that work is simply less efficient than when it is executed by a single team. When done right, project administration is the single most important factor in the success of a technical project.
We usually estimate project management at about 20 percent of the budget. But it’s not uncommon for those costs to go higher, depending on the project velocity, hidden technical debt, and number of project participants. Clients don’t see the time that goes into planning work around complex dependencies, unforeseen delays, and the availability of the project team. The value of this work only becomes evident when something goes wrong.
A better approach is to acknowledge this reality up front. If the cost of this extra effort is not borne out in management fees, it gets hidden in more bugs, delayed launches, and extra work for everyone. A key pillar of our creative operations is to work closely with our clients at the outset of a project to establish the operational rules that we will all adhere to, and to avoid the temptation to bend those rules for the sake of expediency. By embracing the need for administration, and by being transparent about its cost, we establish a solid foundation for a trusting relationship that will be necessary to complete the job successfully, and to maintain a sane schedule for all those involved.
We model radical transparency with our clients, giving them as much insight as possible into our process and challenges. To do this, we use Productive.io, a fantastic project management platform where clients can track our progress down to the smallest detail. They can read our communication on tasks and are encouraged to be a part of that conversation. We also provide consistent reports on the completed work, planned work, and the budget, in addition to a project Dashboard that gives insight into all of that data in real time. In our experience, this level of openness is rare among our peers, but we think it’s essential for building trust and ensuring that our clients feel involved and empowered.
We also provide a lot of detailed documentation that our clients can access in Productive and in a shared Google Drive folder. We share onboarding manuals, detailed project plans, and we record videos showing them how to administer the features we develop for their websites.
The point is that we like to give our clients the tools they need to stay fully engaged in our projects. They have an avenue to communicate with us within the same tool that we use to manage tasks. It’s one more way we ensure our creative operations are always aligned with our clients’ goals.
Good communication is essential to ensuring project success. To keep all project participants consistently informed, our project managers produce weekly reports in Productive that provide real-time insight in the project budget, the status of key milestones, and any tasks that are blocked pending information from the client. Our clients engage deeply with these updates, using them to reprioritize the work we are doing for them. It’s also a great way for both teams to establish a common understanding of the project priorities.
Like most agencies, we schedule regular check-in calls with clients throughout the lifecycle of a project. When we do this, we take extra care to only invite people who need (or want) to be on the calls. The attendee list for each meeting may change, based on what is being discussed. And we cancel that meeting if there is nothing substantive on the docket.
To manage those meetings, we also set up “living agendas,” continually evolving Google documents that record all the topics discussed in these meetings, and any decisions and todo items that come out of them. Clients have direct access to these documents and can reference them at any time.
Perhaps the most important pillar of our creative operations is recognizing that the mental health of everyone involved in a project is fundamental to delivering sustained, high-quality, creative work. Employees who are burned out can’t produce innovative solutions that lead to impactful results. Too many agencies place the burden of managing work on their own staff, without regard to the capacity of those people. This issue is compounded by the fact that agencies derive profit from selling services, so there is a built in incentive to pile on the work.
To address this, we manage the capacity of our team across all the projects they are working on and we adjust tasks on a weekly basis depending on the changing needs of those projects. To do this, we built our own Capacity Report that pulls in data via an API. We include not only relevant project tasks and planned vacation time, but also reserved time for unforeseen needs that are based on the historical performance of our projects. This gives us insight into the capacity of our entire team over the next 12 months. It’s a critical tool that also helps us schedule new work when it comes in.
By preventing overbooking, we ensure that everyone has a balanced workload and can perform at their best. This balance is crucial, not only for the success of the project, but also for maintaining a healthy work-life balance for our team. The long-term benefit is that our colleagues stick around longer, become better at their jobs, and produce even higher quality work.
At 4Site, creative operations is about fostering an environment where our creativity thrives, our team flourishes and our clients get quality service. As the SVP of Creative Operations at 4Site, I manage our full creative ecosystem. I’m deeply involved in strategic planning, business development, and ensuring seamless team collaboration.
This strategic commitment is appreciated by our team and our clients recognize the benefits as well. As one of our retainer clients wrote to me, “Our work would not be possible without your project managers, who carefully monitor and report where we are at any given point in time and help us make trade-offs. Top notch job!”
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