At the heart of every well run agency is a system that supports the process of bringing people together, and helping them run their project on time, under budget and with such gusto that delights clients. Any such system must be based on 5 proven and time-tested principles. Here they are:

Clarity

This sits at the heart of what every marketing agency should be aiming for with every one of their client project assignments. It is important that there is clarity on both ends, the client and the agency team - clarity on timing, deliverables, and above all the desired outcome and the goal of the campaign or engagement. Without clarity, people make assumptions. And when that happens things begin to go off the rails.

Clear line of responsibility

This means that in all the engagements, there has to be a clear and direct line of responsibility. The team internally needs to be able to say who is responsible for what, at the same time, the client needs to be able to say who is responsible for their outcome within the agency itself. Therefore, they should be able to know who they're going to go talk to, or who they're going to ask for an update, or who they need to escalate things with. So they get things done for their project

Clear deadlines and deliverables

As the old saying goes, things without a deadline take forever to get done. That's funny, but also partially true. What we see more and more in today's world, is people working across multiple projects, multiple deliverables, and multiple clients. It's therefore imperative that you have clear deadlines, and deliverables, to guide actions to make sure the team and the client all know what needs to be done by when in terms of what gets to be delivered.

Easy access to reference material and other information

It is not uncommon to find that a whole lot of people are spending a lot of their time at work, simply looking for information. And what's worse, in many cases, one does not find what they're looking for. And they will end up having to recreate, rewrite, re-edit or otherwise spend time, basically recreating what was already there that they just couldn't find. This can be especially damaging for an agency because a lot of the work is done on a time and material basis. So the more time people spend searching (and not finding), that doesn't move the needle, instead the more the project cost goes up (and margin plummet). It's therefore very important that the information is readily available at hand.

Quick and easy updates to actions

What we mean by that is that you have to be able as an individual contributor to go and make a change to the action you're working on to say that something is done, not done, postponed, change priority, changed due date, whatever happens, to be. But you need to be able to go and do that yourself, immediately.

We've seen in many cases with agencies where the workers do the work and then they spend half an hour during the day or worse in the middle of the night, trying to go and update the to-do list so that it reflects some of what they've done for the day. This is far from ideal, what should be happening is the system that you use to track actions allows you to report on the work right away.

When that's done successfully it has a double benefit. Individual contributors can get on with their next set of work and focus on that exclusively; and managers where they are product managers, account executives, producers and so on get to know exactly where things are up all the time. They in turn are better prepared to speak with a client, give updates, or just chase down problems and look for ways to help the team deliver.

Unfortunately most people don't have access to software that allows this real time, fluid, effortless dynamic to take place. We've had the same problem and finally built Thanexa. Teams that use Thanexa are able to achieve all those five things right within the application.

Starting with clarity, Thanexa help teams work within projects and that gives everybody the ability to know what the outcome is and what they're aiming for.
It provides for clear, specific interactions and clear specific outcome.
Offers ensure clear line of responsibility because everything that's worth doing is assigned to a person.
Out of the box, provides provides clear deadlines, deliverables and decision management, all within the same chronological stream of information.
Finally, all information is available at hand, including decisions, files, links to resources and everything else you might need, even notes that people can edit by themselves or with others at the same time.

Thanexa has changed the way we work, and it will help your agency teams also deliver work faster, and keep your clients delighted.