Summary
In this blog, we outline 8 Ways agency resource solutions can transform your operations. You’ll learn how smarter resourcing can cut inefficiencies, keep projects on budget, and stop teams from over-servicing. With the right tools, agencies gain a clearer view of capacity, costs, and talent needs to scale with confidence.
The efficient utilisation of staff and management of people are fundamental to the success of an agency. To ensure that agency employees and teams are organised and optimised for performance, there needs to be a clear understanding of resource management and the benefits gained by utilising agency resource solutions.
What are agency resource solutions?
Agency Operations Solutions are technologies that enable agency leaders to effectively manage ‘resources’ (who would have guessed?). In business speak, ‘resources’ almost exclusively refer to ‘human’ resources or the more modern term ‘people management’. In its most basic form, resource management tools oversee people’s time and workloads to ensure that everyone in a company is utilising the hours in the working day. Modern resource solutions can do a lot more than fill blocks of time and can provide intelligent insights into profitability, productivity, talent, engagement, capacity, and more. These tools can supercharge managers ability to keep employees engaged and keep projects on track and on budget.
The 8 Key Benefits of Agency Resource Solutions
1. Visibility over work with a central calendar
The agency world moves fast. Teams are producing content at a rapid pace. Without technology, agency leaders can’t see the full picture of what their teams are working on. Resourcing tools let managers track all current projects and spot what’s coming next. Dashboards highlight where the opportunities and challenges lie in real-time.
2. Assign work quickly and easily
Remember when we used to have meetings to get updates on who was working on each element of a project? I wonder how many hours were accumulated over the hours, days, and weeks associated with these project management meetings. Agency leaders and managers need to handle a variety of pressures, but assigning work needn’t be one of them. Resource management software facilitates ‘drag and drop’ assignment of work to staff and freelancers. You can easily switch assignments between users or extend assignment duration by dragging across calendar entries.
3. Automate capacity planning
Effective capacity planning ensures that agencies only take on projects that they have the resources available to complete on time. Capacity planning enables agencies to connect strategy to delivery by predicting future resourcing needs and integrating business pipeline data and confirmed project resource commitments into one central resourcing dashboard.
Successful capacity planning can feel complicated, but relying on technology can take a lot of hassle out of the process. Rather than doing capacity planning manually, modern agencies rely on agency management software that easily allows them to map and build out workflows for managing resources!
New capabilities in AI give agency and operations managers the ability to avail of smart resourcing. In Screendragon’s system, one click of a button will allocate the available people to a project, based on their skills, availability, and previous experience working with the brand.
4. Intelligent Time Tracking
It may be a well-worn cliche, but when it comes to agencies, ‘time is money’. Many agencies bill clients by the hour, so time becomes part of the product they sell. In these cases, teams need to use time wisely to deliver real value to the customer. Agencies that work on fixed-cost projects must track time even more carefully, because every hour beyond the forecast eats into profit and leads to over-servicing (more on that later).
With so many moving parts to consider, time tracking for agencies can be hectic. Time tracking enables agencies to see a detailed picture of how long each task takes. When it is laid out clearly, it becomes easier to identify and fix inefficient processes.
5. Reduce over-servicing
A lean agency that understands its workloads, costings, and timings can prevent over-servicing. When teams give a client more time than originally billed, the agency reduces the value of the deal. It also often causes stress and a reduction in quality as people rush to get a job out the door. Agency operations solutions will provide a holistic view of projects and tasks that ensure that every project is billed accurately and delivered efficiently! To learn more about how to avoid overserving, read our blog post.
6. Control over margins
Running an agency involves wearing many hats and juggling clients across verticals while also dealing with seemingly ever-increasing customer demands! The last thing you want in the mix is unforeseen low project margins due to a lack of knowledge on workloads. Agency resource software gives you full visibility of your resources and can accurately forecast what will be needed for a proposed project. This means that you can calculate and agree on a fair price that delivers value for both the client and your agency. Everybody wins!
7. Maximise your talent pool
Agencies are packed with talent, but how do you ensure that each employee maximises their performance? People are happier when they’re utilising their skills and fulfilling their potential. It can be difficult for managers to keep track of and develop each employee’s skillet so why not let technology help?
A resource planner can filter on location, talent, and experience. This enables agencies to identify what skills are needed for certain projects and ensure that they have the necessary skills in-house. If there are gaps in the team’s expertise, an agency can hire a freelancer or look at recruiting new members to the team.
8. Recruitment and retention
Over-stretched teams and poor structures make the job of recruiting new employees longer and more costly. Worse still, it can lead to a negative effect by damaging an agency’s brand. Word spreads quickly in the agency world, so companies need to build a reputation as a great place to work if they want to attract top talent.
When employees feel supported and can reach their potential, staff turnover drops. A fulfilling and reliable work experience will mean that few people will ever want to leave!
Screendragon Agency Resource Solutions
Screendragon’s agency management software provides a central hub that manages an agency operation from end-to-end. Calculate the feasibility and profitability of new business, build scopes, allocate resources, and manage all elements of a project within a cloud-based web app. Smart briefing systems, visual workflows, and predictive analytics put the right person on a project at the right time.