Digital Agency Playbook

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Projects

Steps to delivering on the work and tools to keep things on track

Project Reviews

Weekly status roundup at Four Kitchens · Mike Minecki

Design Research

Huge's client research bible · Theo Shure · Jocelyn Chuang

Client Collab Doc

Meeting notes and shared to dos · Saagar Gupta

A project is a set body of work with a start and end date with a goal that you're hoping to achieve. For digital agencies, this often comes in the form of designing, developing, and promoting a website.

Some other common projects:

New client onboarding.

Implementation of software, like Hubspot.

Building an app.

Running a multi-channel, time-sensitive campaign.

The unique thing about running projects as a digital agency is that the success is split between an internal and an external company. It's a partnership between two ーpotentially very different ーorganizations, which means that it's harder to align your people, processes, and technology.

For example, who is leading the project? Well, the answer is both sides, often a Project Manager on the agency side and the a client point of contact / champion on the other. Who's project management tool do you use? Maybe you've been invite into the client's Jira instance, maybe you try to build a bridge in-between your two teams, perhaps you track internally and send project updates over email.

While the high-level flow of projects is outlined in

Workflows⁠

, being:

💜 Potential 🖋 In Proposal 🔖 Soft Book 🚜 Active ✋ On Hold 🚀 Complete

⁠

Each project, in the 🚜 Active status, goes through a series of steps to make it a success. Depending on the size of the project and your verbiage, some call these tasks or milestones. In generally looks something like this.

Project Template Timeline

Project Template Timeline

Apr 27 - Jun 15

Kickoff

Research

Design

Development

QA Testing

Launch Communication

Set Live!

Post-mortum

Apr 27

May 4

May 11

May 18

May 25

Jun 1

Jun 8

Jun 15

Kickoff

Research

Design

Development

QA Testing

Launch Communication

Set Live!

Post-mortum

⁠

Project Template List

Project Template List

Title

Description

Start

End

Kickoff

Align on who's involved, what's involved. Write a project brief.

5/3/2020

5/14/2020

Research

Dig into the user problems, needs, and jobs to be done that they are trying to achieve.

5/8/2020

5/14/2020

Design

Understand the user flows and start designing wireframes and mockups of what the product will look like. If you're prototyping, there may be user testing in this phase.

5/13/2020

5/18/2020

Development

Take the designs (may come with front end code already) and begin writing the logic and process of the product. Spinning up any infrastructure that's needed.

5/11/2020

5/22/2020

QA Testing

Ensure that things are running as they should be testing common user scenarios as well as running scripts to make sure the code is working well.

5/19/2020

5/25/2020

Launch Communication

Work with the client to decide the communication plan to their customer base and the world.

5/20/2020

5/31/2020

Set Live!

Press the button 🔘 to launch it!

5/28/2020

6/3/2020

Post-mortum

Circle up with both sides to see what went well and what can improve (hopefully) next time.

6/2/2020

6/9/2020

There are no rows in this table

⁠

This is a pretty "waterfall" that aligns more with a System Development Lifecycle (SDLC) way of going about building digital products. Many agencies have switched to an agile/ scrum/ kanban methodology of development. In that method, agencies work in iterative chunks. Development doesn't wait for months to get the work, they prototype often and early.

This type of work is visualized a bit differently 👇

Kanban Board