Harry Bailey

Harry Bailey is a technology and delivery leader who specialises in turning agency project chaos into clarity. With more than twenty years of experience as a developer, agency founder and fractional CTO, he helps digital and creative agencies build stronger engineering and delivery cultures and improve commercial outcomes. He focuses on practical, immediately actionable strategies, not theory, so teams can ship work on time and with less drama.

Better Project Risk Management for Agencies

a sign on a stone wall warning of danger

What do successful projects look like? Is it about profitability? Is it about making clients happy? A proud team? Or always hitting deadlines?

Success often means the avoidance of potential failures. And failure avoidance is about surfacing and mitigating risk.

Risk to project delivery comes in many forms. Complete failure is luckily rare. Most project risks only reduce the amount of success that can be achieved, and value that can be created.

Modern agencies serve many concurrent clients. Every one is different. They come with distinct requirements and people. Every project is unique. With new outcomes and deliverables.

Risk needs consideration and review before every new project.

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Winning with fixed-price, fixed-scope clients

padlock on metal gate during daytime

A new client walks through your door with a big pot of money and no plans for how to spend it. A rare creature indeed.

More likely, the client will share some details about what they see a project creating and the reason for their business needing it.

You might call these initial details sandcastles. The plans may look well-defined and considered, but it’s not ready to be a forever thing. 

They may have been planned without any evidence that it will actually work. It could be lacking input from people with the right experience. It might be too simple or too complex. There are plenty of opportunities to discuss making changes to the plan or even starting again.

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Defining and Achieving Client Value in Projects: Essential Insights

How can we deliver value to a client unless we share an understanding of what value means for the project?

We’ve all heard of “value for money” and that something can itself be valuable. But how does the language fit into our project delivery and client management approach?

Projects start in different ways, but they all need to have one thing in common. Whether the client brings you a simple vision for the work, or they hand over a detailed 200-page specification, you still want to understand how to return the most value you can in the time available.

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On Medium: You know what Agency Clients love? Certainty.

The article—posted to my Medium account—reflects on the challenges that Agile-first agencies face when they acquire new clients who often have a preference for traditional, Waterfall project management.

When we’re accustomed to agility and flexibility, we must adapt to provide the certainty and structured approach desired by a new client, balancing the innate human need for both certainty and excitement.

This adaptation involves documenting a delivery approach and being less agile about Agile.

But does changing our approach mean we’re no longer Agile?

Read ‘You know what Agency Clients love? Certainty.’ on Medium.