Growing

Thought pieces and guidance on how to use incremental improvement to build a team’s superpowers. Inspect and adapt approaches to being better every day.

The theory is, that if you’re not growing, you’re probably dying, and in agency project delivery, our focus should always be on how to run each client project more smoothly and successful than the one before.

There are 27 posts filed in Growing (this is page 1 of 6).

One Sentence Fixes for Common Project Delivery Challenges

Project delivery can be tricky, with various hurdles along the way. Whether it’s tight timelines, miscommunication, or scope creep, here are some quick, super-simplified solutions that can make a big difference in keeping your projects on track.

*the much-needed context of your agency is not here included. But it could be if you’re in need!

  1. Client Alignment — Ask about their hopes and dreams for the project before it begins, then share progress towards those same goals early and often.

    See also Defining and Achieving Client Value in Projects and the Align project focus of my Agency Project Delivery Framework.

  2. Contract / SOW Format — Either document everything in great detail, then stick to the plan, or focus the contract around outcomes that are measurable and achievable.

  3. Estimation — Make and agree a detailed plan to achieve the shared goals, containing only estimatable steps, then get the whole team to estimate their part of each piece using hours.

    See also Why Agencies Can’t Quit Their Really Bad Estimates and the Define project focus of my Agency Project Delivery Framework

  4. Delivery Approach Consistency — Flex your delivery approach to each client based on needs, but maintain core processes and milestones to ensure consistency and quality across projects.

    Explore my Delivery Approach Review Session

  5. Scope Creep — Either document everything in great detail, then reject or charge for changes, or align around outcomes and adapt to maximise impact on some achievable goals.

    See also 5 Agency Strategies to Handle Scope Creep on Your Terms

  6. Project Overruns — Make client alignment non-negotiable, then prioritise procedures, automation and achievable high value deliverables, early and ongoing to ensure you’re building a high quality version of what’s actually valuable.

  7. Rework — Build what achieves the agreed outcomes, while releasing early and often to maintain alignment and limit recalibration.

  8. Agency Agile — Agile frameworks don’t ‘just’ work for agencies and so instead the core Values and Principles of Agile should be adopted in whatever way works for the delivery approach.

    See also Agile Principles & Your Agency and Fixed Price, Fixed Scope Agile and The Agency Project Delivery Framework.

If you’re seeing these challenges at your agency, learn more about how I can de-risk your agency’s project delivery.

Scope Creep Happens – 5 Agency Strategies to Handle It on Your Terms

Hand adding a sticky note to an existing grid

Scope Creep is Common

You’ll have seen it many times before. A project starts smoothly, but once you’ve started sharing progress, and asked for feedback, the requests begin. Small tweaks, additional features—before you know it, scope creep is eating into the budget, your margins and can even lead to project overruns.

Scope creep isn’t just an occasional challenge—it’s a constant reality for agencies. A project begins with what feel like clear expectations, but before you know it, your team and the client have differering priorities.

Your team need to be able to keep every project on track, and that means assessing and refining your agency’s delivery approach to avoid this risk.

Often scope creep requests are accidental. Perhaps a naive client with unclear expectations—clients assume something is included, or aren’t clear if they can change their mind.

Sometimes, it can be strategic—a sneaky attempt to squeeze more out of the budget you agreed.

Either way, how you handle it impacts your agency’s profitability, efficiency, and client relationships.

Your tactics during a project must depend on which approach you planned before it begin. The key is to be intentional and consistent.

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The Compound Effect of Starting Projects Well

Act One. Scene One. The Start.

“Let’s just get started. We’ll work it out as we go. Who needs a plan anyway? We’re Agile!”

We knew some stuff. We certainly had enough excitement. The roadmap would become clearer as we did the work and made progress.

Or at least that was what we assumed. But 20 years ago I was still learning my trade.

And sure enough, not far into the project things got sticky. We’d made decisions without the client. Some which would be tough to undo. But undo them we must. Time and money had been wasted.

The key learning at the time was to know as much as possible before starting. Workshopping, user research, data analysis, paper prototyping. With the client stakeholders.

Often discussions we’d be having as we went anyway, just frontloaded to ensure we all headed in the right direction as a single group.

We found that starting things well had a compound effect on the remainder of the project. A poor start was impossible to compensate for later. Aligning, understanding and agreeing could (and should) all happen before work began.

Then, the majority of projects could be focused on doing, and smaller discoveries and changes to maximise the value being created.

And that’s now a key part of the approach I take with teams. We focus on starting projects well. Aligning around the needs, and a plan, and only then getting started.

Why Agencies Can’t Quit Their Really Bad Estimates

a mountain of colourful dice

If estimating things is so hard, why don’t agencies just stop doing it?

The majority of agency leaders I know don’t like estimates much. Never accurate enough to be trusted, and usually too optimistic. If delivery teams could just be better at creating them, there would be more certainty around timelines.

Delivery teams don’t like estimates either. They take a lot of time to create, and although called ‘estimates’ they often lead to expectations about delivery dates.

So let’s just stop estimating!

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