A Project Management Playbook for Marketing Agencies

Multiple channels, multiple clients, one shared creative team

Take a marketing agency of about twenty-five people, organized into loose functional groups: strategy, paid media, social, and a small creative team producing copy and design assets for everyone else. A dozen client campaigns ran at any given time, each with its own launch date, its own channel mix, and its own set of creative assets that needed to move through the creative team before anything could go live.

The creative team was the shared resource everyone depended on and nobody officially managed the queue for. A campaign manager for one client would ask the creative team for an asset, another campaign manager would ask for something else the same afternoon, and the creative team would work through whatever arrived in whatever order it felt most urgent, which usually meant whoever asked most recently or most insistently.

There was no single view of how many campaigns were actually mid-flight at once, across every channel and every client, which made it easy for the agency to say yes to a new client pitch without a clear sense of whether the team actually had room for it.

Before: a creative team that was always behind and nobody could say why

The creative team's backlog was the recurring source of friction. Campaign managers experienced it as "creative is always behind," while the creative team experienced it as being asked to context-switch between six unrelated requests a day, none of which had been triaged against what else was already committed. Both descriptions were true, and neither side had a way to see the other's side of the queue.

Approval cycles compounded it. A creative asset would go to a client for sign-off, sit for four days without a response, and meanwhile the campaign manager and the creative team had both moved their attention elsewhere, so when the approval finally came back, nobody was quite ready to move on it immediately. The asset had effectively been "in progress" the whole time, without anyone tracking it that way.

And the agency ran its own internal operations, hiring, finance, general admin, on a separate set of tools entirely, disconnected from the client-facing work, so there was no single place an owner could look to see the whole business, campaigns and internal operations together.

After: a queue people could actually see, not just feel

The creative team didn't get faster at producing assets, and client approval cycles didn't get shorter just because a tool existed. What changed was that the backlog stopped being an invisible, argued-about feeling and became a specific, visible queue with a specific size. Campaign managers could see where their request actually sat, and the creative team could see the whole set of demands on them at once instead of whichever one had just been asked out loud.

Cards stuck waiting on client sign-off stopped falling out of everyone's attention during the wait. And new client pitches started getting evaluated against an honest picture of the creative team's existing load, instead of an optimistic assumption that there was always room for one more.