Growing

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

Tools and techniques to help run each client project more smoothly and successful than the one before.

There are 38 posts filed in Growing (this is page 1 of 8).

Embedding AI: High value and low value client interactions

photo of girl laying left hand on white digital robot

I keep noticing how much effort agencies put into every client interaction.
Everything is treated as high stakes, high touch, and deeply personal.

It comes from a good place. No team wants to feel like they are giving clients a thin or automated experience.

But over time I’ve started to question whether all of that effort is actually valuable.

Some interactions genuinely benefit from care and judgement. Others mainly need to be accurate and delivered when promised.

When those two types of interaction get treated the same way, it usually causes problems. Senior people get buried in admin, and the moments that really need judgement get squeezed.

I see this most clearly in delivery work.

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Why Project Management Guides Make Delivery Worse

Subtly misaligned tiles

When delivery starts to feel harder than it should, most agency leaders do the same thing. They look for clarity.

Not a reset. Not a wholesale change. Just something sensible to read that might explain why plans keep slipping, why outcomes still surprise people, and why teams feel busy without things becoming more predictable.

So they search for a guide. Often something like “mastering agency project management in 2026”.

What they find looks reassuring. Long, confident, recently updated. Full of methods, tools, templates, and best practice. It reads like a comprehensive answer to a complicated problem.

It feels current. It feels responsible. It feels like the right thing to be reading and taking action on.

Months pass. Planning is still slow. Risks are noticed early but only discussed once they start affecting delivery. Outcomes still surprise people who believed they had done the right preparation.

That pattern is worth paying attention to.

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Should you manage work in progress in agency teams?

a neon sign that says actually doing the things

How many complex things can a human do at the same time?

It’s not a trick question. The answer likely came to you immediately. Correct, it’s one.

Doing more than one complex thing at the same time leads to terrible outcomes. Take driving and using a mobile phone as the extreme example.

In product teams — who often focus on a single goal for many weeks at a time — there are strict limits on work in progress. A person can be assigned to only one thing. Teams work on one thing per team member, minus one thing to ensure redundancy.

In agencies these rules are often less clearly defined, and sometimes don’t exist. People are commonly multi-assigned. They could be spending time across two or more projects, while also covering support agreement work.

It’s not uncommon for me to see people assigned to ten or more tickets. Yes 1-0, ten.

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Thoughts on the sales process

How often is there a mismatch between your agency sales and delivery process?

How often do we deliver something fundamentally different from what we thought was agreed with a client?

It’s rare for the sales process to include much time from the delivery team. It inflates the cost of sales, and unsuccessful pitches feel significantly more risky. So is it worth it?

Is it worth it?

For me, absolutely. Agency sales teams aren’t always able to consider the risk that’s baked into the projects they sell without experienced members of delivery. There has to be a better approach that isn’t many times more expensive.

I see this reduction of project risk, and the multiplying effect on team and client engagement as an investment in the future. An acknowledgment that project failure and client churn is significantly more expensive than bringing forward discussions about project delivery. Even if some projects never happen.

What would early delivery involvement look like?

Start with the ‘why’. Why now, why this, what will success look like and how will we measure it?

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