Reaction

So you did the custom training first and then you put a team member through Digital Foundations.

That’s correct.

What made you decide to come back to Louder Than Ten for the Foundations program?

We’re always looking at different ways of improving the capabilities of our team members and believe that professional development is beneficial to our business. We have a project manager who handles all of those PM tasks at our company but it became very obvious over the last few years that project management is actually a key part of delivering successful work for clients. It’s easy to find someone to do the actual work, whether that’s design or development or content. But part of delivering a good customer experience is making sure that that work is delivered not just on time and on budget, but that the client feels updated throughout the project and feels like they know what’s going on.

We started to internally embrace the fact that successfully delivered project management is everybody’s responsibility. Even though there’s a project manager, everyone can contribute to successfully managing a project. So, we wanted our project director [Lisa D’Arcy], who’s often leading the designers and the developers and the writers on the projects, to have a better understanding of what our project manager is doing and for what project management means at the agency. She’s a practitioner of design development and content and strategy, not project management.

So, putting her through the course, I think it wasn’t even about training her to be a PM, it was about equipping her with the context of what happens on the project management side so that she could make sure the work that she was doing with the team was contributing to a good project experience for the client.

Are you able to share a process that you’ve changed based on Lisa’s recommendations?

One was improving the amount of upfront communication that we give to our remote team members. We would often have an onboarding call where we would go over the project and talk about deliverables, but there wasn’t often a lot of documentation that went along with that. So, we have now increased the amount of upfront work that we’re doing.

It’s not just about giving remote team members more context and more information upfront. We’re dedicating the time in our projects, budgets, and forecasting to make sure that that planning is done upfront.

In terms of estimating projects and doing a risk analysis—can you speak to changes that have been made there?

We’ve definitely taken scoping and estimating from a sales activity to more of a project [management] activity. It’s become less about sales and more about involving the team. We now have more team members involved in the scoping and estimating process than we ever did before. We are building better buffers based on risk.

We even have different contract language that we can use based on how custom or standard the requests are. We can structure our work in a few different billing models based on levels of certainty about the project and things like that. So, being able to have these tools in our toolbox has allowed us to mitigate a ton of risk and the clients are happier because we’re very accurate with what we’re coming to them with.

Has the LT10 experience shifted the way you handle client relationships?

From day one, 14 years ago, thinking about our client experience has always been a top priority and we’ve always looked at everything we do through the lens of how the client experience is going to be. And so I think we always did a pretty good job of that, but now the whole team is thinking about how we manage the project, how we track things, and how we report things.

We know about problems before they happen. We can get ahead of them with clients and we can often come up with solutions that don’t always require more budget or more time. This is because we’re so in tune with how the project is going and it’s not just the job of a project manager to go get trained and then do all these things in the company. The account manager, the project lead, the developers—everybody has to know that successfully managing this project is very important.

So that makes it a lot easier to improve that client experience. I’d say 50 to 60% of our revenue comes from existing clients.

That’s amazing.

And then another 20 or 30% is referral-based. So, nearly 80% of all the revenue that we get is from a client’s experience as opposed to just somebody new coming in. That I think speaks volumes.

How do you handle client communication?

Communicating with clients is extremely important. We’ve embraced the fact that not every client wants to communicate the same way and it’s okay to adjust the way that you communicate to meet the needs of clients—but it doesn’t change the kinds of things that need to be communicated.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve invited all of our clients into a chat software so that they have direct access to our team. We have also invited our clients into our project management software, so they get to see the status of all their tasks and the comments that are related to them in one place. We send out regular status updates to clients who’d rather receive that through email, so they’ll get a weekly or biweekly update. We have some clients that would rather get a phone call and talk about this once a week, so we’ll set up weekly scrums with those.

We’ve gotten very flexible about how we communicate with clients, but at the same time, it hasn’t created inconsistencies. It has just made it feel like we’re really out there to keep our clients informed.

It’s not just a customer service thing. When you’re keeping clients up to date, you actually have to have the project management behind the scenes to actually make sure their updates are accurate, and what you’re going to be working on a month from now is what you’re telling them you’re going to be working on a month from now.

What will the next five years look like for the digital world?

I think the thing that’s going to change the most over the next five years is businesses relying on their websites and their digital marketing for their own success and survival. Pre-pandemic, we were already moving to a more digital world. Every single metric or trend you’d find pointed to more online sales or more online engagement.

COVID accelerated that by maybe five or ten years. So, where I think we would’ve been in 2025, 2028 is probably where we’re at now in 2022. And I think businesses that need to capitalize on this hard shift to digital need a team to help them do that.

I think that feeds into our relationship ethos, that it’s not about contracting out these services, it’s about partnering with an agency or partnering with a team. You can be doing great work, but if it’s disorganized or chaotic, or if the client feels like they’re out of the loop all the time, you will get replaced.

So, project management becomes a value proposition. Even if you’re doing really good quality work, it’s also just an essential part of your service, so you have to deliver it.

If an agency was thinking about enroling one of their teammates in a Louder Than Ten course, what would you tell them?

I would say that enroling with Louder Than Ten gives you the opportunity to understand project management from the context and perspective of other companies and professionals. It does a good job of not forcing a specific project management methodology on you. It really does hit on the fundamentals, and you’re able to then take those and apply them in unique ways to your own business.

I think that the Louder Than Ten course is a good enough overview that someone who isn’t a project manager can take this course and get a lot of value out of it. There are a lot of opportunities for other members of the team to get project management training, and this is a good course because it covers enough ground that you’ll come out of it feeling like you’re ready to contribute to that part of the business.