.png "How Can Project Management Tools Help Creative Agencies?")
How do successful creative agencies manage their projects and in-house operations? What is the key difference between the leading creative agencies and the ones that are just staying afloat?
If you are a creative agency owner and can find the answers to these questions, this blog is for you.
With so many departments to manage and so many creative brains teeming with ideas, the road ahead is always full of obstacles for any creative agency.
However, when unclear goals and a lack of real-time view of ongoing operations start affecting productivity, it’s time to change how you work!
Embracing workplace automation with project management software for agencies is one such change that can spur awesome transformation.
Let’s find out how!
What Are Project Management Tools?
Project management tools help an individual or team in managing and organizing multiple projects and underlying tasks effectively. You can get a real-time view of your projects, tasks, and timelines. With functionalities for each department and every employee, it helps you elevate project planning, data organization, and collaboration activities.
With better project organization and flawless execution, your creative agency can take on more projects and achieve sustainable growth. Your team can collaborate on different ideas in real-time and export or input data in multiple ways.
Moreover, with the management having a clear vision of the pending, ongoing, and completed tasks, and with everybody having a sense of ownership, work gets streamlined.
Some other benefits of using creative agency project management software are as follows:
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24X7 project monitoring and tracking
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Better team collaboration
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Milestone visualization (Gantt Charts)
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Manage project roles and responsibilities
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Organize creative ideas and share feedback
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Alerts and notifications
Most large creative agencies already understand how these abilities can organize and transform their workplace culture. But, SMBs and start-ups might still consider project management software as an operational or financial overhead.
Hence, up next, we discuss why project management software for agencies is a business must-have!
Why Are Project Management Tools Important for Creative Agencies?
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Progress Tracking
It is challenging to document creative projects as most of them begin with an idea. They tend to evolve over time, and task allocation and tracking for such projects become a painful task.
Agency project management tools offer impeccable project, employee, and time tracking capabilities. You can track the progress of every single task and visualize the milestones with Gantt Charts.
So, you no longer have vague timelines and uncertain delivery dates.
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Centralized Business Communication
With multiple ongoing projects and new ones adding to the pool, it becomes impossible to manage everything manually or with basic tools like sheets. The operations in a creative agency have a lot of redundancy, and having a high-level overview of all the projects is a must.
The project management tools can offer a centralized view of all the projects, communication, data, resources, and in-house knowledge repository. Employees from one team or different departments can collaborate on multiple projects without any issue with a central dashboard view.
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Workload Management
Project management software helps creative agencies in managing the project flow via smart and efficient workload management functionalities. These tools facilitate processes and strategies for proper work distribution and maintain the balance in the entire team.
You can leverage powerful features such as "Task Dependencies," which allow you to see whether a new task allotment to one employee can affect the previous allotments or not.
Collaborative Features
Collaboration becomes a challenge when it comes to in-house and remote teams. Having a reliable project management tool facilitates effortless collaboration between different in-house teams, different departments, and remote teams as well.
It streamlines the communication across the entire agency network and allows everyone to stay on the same page with timely notifications. Team members can easily discuss ideas, share their feedback, and tag other team members using task comments.
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Insightful Reporting
Smart creative project management software like ProProfs Project comes with powerful analytics and reporting capabilities. You can generate delightful reports within minutes and share them with upper management or clients as and when required.
From project status to task breakdown, due dates, accomplished tasks, financial summaries, and Gantt Charts - you get presentation-ready reports.
Data-driven reports make your project development progress transparent and help you identify anomalies.
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Budget Management
In creative agencies, it is very common for projects to exceed the proposed budgets. It can become a big problem when you don’t realize and convey this to your clients in time. Hence, budget management is important for successful project delivery.
The project management software for agencies offers a thorough budget tracking and monitoring capability. With automated and continuous budget monitoring, there is no scope of cost overruns.
Next, we share the best creative project management tool options that can transform your operations and steer your business towards growth.
Top 7 Project Management Software for Creative Agencies:
ProProfs Project
ProProfs Project is an easy-to-use and one of the best project management software that offers impeccable tracking and monitoring functionalities. You can plan your project tasks, distribute them smartly, and clearly view task dependencies. You can visualize your project progress using Gantt Charts, prioritize urgent projects, and generate delightful reports in a few clicks!
Unique Features:
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Milestone tracking
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CRM Software
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Task management
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Client portal
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Resource management
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Billing and invoicing
Pricing: The paid plans start from $2/user/month, and you can try any plan free for 15 days.
Trello
Trello is another excellent project management software for creative agencies, which offers smart collaboration and extensive customization features. You can organize tasks, timelines, resources and track projects with lists and cards. The software scales well with your business and steers it towards growth.
Unique Features:
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Content management
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Customizable tables
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Billing and invoicing
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Agile methodologies
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Activity dashboard
Pricing: There is a forever free plan, while the paid plans start from $5/month/user.
Monday.com
Monday.com is perfect for projects of all types and all scales. It comes with a centralized dashboard view that offers keen insights into the project progress and shows real-time data. You can visualize the project progress with Gantt Charts and enjoy better control over dependencies and milestones. However, if you're looking for a comparison, it's worth considering Monday.com vs ClickUp to find the best fit for your specific project needs."
Unique Features:
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Budget management
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Portfolio management
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Traditional methodologies
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Milestone tracking
Pricing: There is a forever free plan and free trial. The paid plans start from $10/user/month.
Wrike
A versatile and reliable project management software for agencies, Wrike does a commendable job with its powerful features and easy-to-use interface. Be it creating perfect project schedules, keeping the task dependencies in mind, or detecting any bottlenecks, Wrike is awesome! It has customizable Kanban boards that make it extremely easy to manage tasks.
Unique Features:
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Innovative themes
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Custom branding
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Time tracking
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Sub-tasking
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Automated reminders and notifications
Pricing: There is a forever free plan, and the paid plans start from $9.8/user/month.
Jira
Jira is an excellent and reliable project management software for marketing agencies for startups and creative agencies. Its agile methodologies, like Kanban and Scrum, make planning, tracking, and project management extremely easy. Be it development, managing, and tackling backlogs or roadmaps, Jira has your back like a pro!
Unique Features:
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Agile project management
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Task management
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Excellent customization
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Collaboration
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Clean UI
Pricing: There is a forever free plan, and paid plans start from $7/person/month.
ProofHub
ProofHub is a top-rated project management and team collaboration software that offers a suite of advanced features under one virtual roof. Creative agencies can use ProofHub to manage various aspects of their work from a centralized location. Be it task management, time tracking, project scheduling, tracking or more, ProofHub gives users the flexibility and ultimate control over their projects and teams in the most efficient way possible.
Unique features:
- Custom fields
- Time tracking
- Kanban boards
- Reporting
- Online proofing
- Scheduling calendar
- Table view
- Real-time notifications
Pricing: Visit ProofHub’s pricing page for more information.
Stackby
Stackby is a collaborative & no-code spreadsheet-based data management application and a compelling alternative to Airtable.
It helps you store, organise, and access your data in multiple views (table, kanban, calendar, gallery) or even create custom forms to bring data. It provides a user-friendly spreadsheet sty;e interface and customizable database templates. It has been designed to meet non-technical employees' needs and bring structure and visibility to workflows.
Unique Features:
- 300+ Customizable Database Templates
- 25+ unique column types (Attachments, Dropdowns, Link, Lookup, Aggregation etc.)
- 6 different views (Grid, Kanban, Calendar, Gallery, Forms)
- Collaboration and Sharing
- Data Visualization with Charts, Pivot tables and more.
- Advanced Filters and Sorting
- Column level API connectors with popular services like YouTube, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads etc.
Pricing : There is a forever free plan, while the Paid plans start from $4/month/user or $129 for 3 users annually.
Choose the Right Project Management Software: Steer Your Creative Agency Towards Growth
As important as it is to have project management software, choosing the "right one" is also crucial for the best results. Hence, we recommend you identify your operations’ pain points and then compare the project management tools shared above.
If you are on a tight budget, you can opt for the free versions or trial versions and then evaluate the performance against your needs. However, overall functionality, support, feature set, and scalability are key differentiators that you must never compromise with.
Organized and well-managed teams yield the most creative results and drive sustainable business growth. So, make the smart choice and start using the best project management software today!
