In April, we began re-imagining how we communicate and collaborate with our clients. Inspired by Domino's pizza tracker, we narrowed the scope of what we share with clients, focusing only on what's important. These efforts led to us moving all clients into a "Project/Client Tracker," built with Google sheets. Yes, Google sheets!
For fixed-fee projects, clients have:
- Launch date (with assumptions)
- Project schedule
- Change log
For retainers, clients have:
- Weekly burn report
- Monthly/quarterly initiatives with estimates
While both trackers have been well-received by clients, we recently noticed a blind spot with our retainer clients — initiatives don't have client-facing schedules. We do monthly planning with clients to determine priorities, but there is no system for outlining the timeline later.
I chatted with Kate, Director of Client Services, about this last week and learned that Account Leads have been creating versions on their own for some accounts but not all. The good news is that task-level schedules exist in some places; the bad news is they are not everywhere or consistent.
Luckily, this is a pretty straightforward solve. I'm looking forward to hashing it out with Kate this week, then rolling it out with the team.
This post originally appeared in Edition No. 114 of my newsletter. Subscribe here.
Monday, November 14, 2022
