This article contains tips, useful links and a potential workflow for working with Teamleader Focus in a creative agency. We made the assumption that projects are the heart of your organisation and that will be the basis of this article.
Needless to say, all companies work differently and these are just guidelines to help you along. If you have other questions, browse through our support centre for specific info on modules or contact our support team.
Here is what we will go over:
Planning
Projects
Documents
Time tracking
Planning
Recurrent task and meetings
In the quest for automation, you want to spend as little work on planning as needed. Make tasks you need to fulfill daily or weekly recurrent. The same goes for meetings.
Projects
Creative agencies often have a clear process in mind when embarking on a new project with a customer. In Teamleader Focus, these are arranged by adding phases under projects, and tasks and meetings under phases. Below, you’ll find some interesting things to keep in mind.
Work breakdown
When planning, use phases in Teamleader Focus to subdivide your project in different parts, from the conceptual part all the way to presenting your work to the customer and publishing. To start creating additional phases and add tasks and meetings to these phases, click on a project and you'll be redirected to the work breakdown page.
The work breakdown might look something like this:
The way you divide your phases is, of course, very dependent on the type of work you do. The most important thing to keep in mind is to know exactly what is expected from who within each phase. A phase will always have a final responsible colleague, but tasks and meetings created under each phase can be assigned to others.
Also make sure to close the phase when all tasks and meetings in it are completed. You can very easily do this by hovering over your phase and choosing Close phase. If, at the end of the ride, a phase is still open, the project will be considered ongoing:
Dependent phases
In some cases, you can only start working on a certain phase when the one before is completed. You can’t start your front-end developing if you haven’t received a wireframe, for example. Find out out how to make phases dependent on each other.
Budget spent
In a project Budget spent displays your customer's budget and how much billable hours are spent. Budget management on projects is a way to keep track of the predetermined budget you and your customer have agreed upon. By allocating resources and estimating time on billable tasks & meetings, you'll know if you are going over budget. You can find this functionality under the 'Project info' tab in the header of your project.
Profit
Keep track of your costs and potential revenue via the Profit feature in every project. Take a look at the Details in order to see where most of your costs come from, so you can tweak where needed. You can find this functionality under the 'Project info' tab in the header of your project.
Cross-projects timeline
From your project list overview, you can easily switch to the cross-projects timeline. The cross-projects timeline provides you with a visual timeline overview of all your projects. It lets you continuously evaluate how occupied your business is and shows you which projects need your attention.
Project Planning
Make use of the project planning tool to efficiently divide work among colleagues.
Documents
Creative agencies have lots of visuals to share by definition. Here are some best practices on exchanging files both internally and with your customers.
External access to projects
(Feature available in our Boost package)
To keep in touch with customers, their questions and mood swings, you might want to consider granting them external access to projects, allowing them to keep track of your progress made in projects. All files uploaded to the project will become visible and downloadable for your customer. You can find this functionality under the 'Project info' tab in the header of your project.
Dropbox
You can upload files to all your modules, but if you want to centralize your documents, we highly recommend using Teamleader Focus’ Dropbox integration.
Time tracking
If you want to know exactly what your work is worth, accurate time tracking will be essential. There are plenty of ways to track your hours in Teamleader Focus, but check these out:
Time Tracker: Start tracking straight from your Teamleader Focus account.
Mobile app: Working without your laptop? Track time via the Teamleader Focus Mobile app.
What’s your best tip for working with Teamleader Focus? Feel free to contact our support team.