Juggling multiple clients, tight deadlines, and shifting priorities is the daily reality for any creative, digital, or advertising agency. It’s a delicate balancing act between fostering creativity and maintaining profitability. Without a solid framework, any agency project can easily derail, leading to budget overruns, missed deadlines, and a burnt-out team.
This is where effective agency project management steps in. It’s the discipline that brings order to the creative storm, providing the structure, agency project management processes, and tools needed to navigate complexity with confidence. By mastering the art of agency project management, we can transform our workflows, enhance client relationships, and empower our teams to do what they do best: create amazing things. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know, from foundational principles to the best tools and techniques to ensure your projects are a resounding success.
Introduction to agency project management
Before we dive into the specific methods and tools, it’s crucial to understand what agency project management is and why it's so vital for the health and growth of any agency. It’s more than just a set of tasks; it’s a strategic function that underpins the entire operation.
What is agency project management?
Agency project management is the specialized practice of planning, executing, and overseeing projects within an agency environment. Unlike project management in other industries, it’s uniquely tailored to the needs of creative, marketing, and advertising firms, making it a distinct discipline from general project management. It’s the art of guiding a project from the initial client brief to the final deliverable, ensuring every milestone is met on time, within budget, and to the client's satisfaction.
Think of it as being the conductor of a creative orchestra. The agency project manager ensures that the copywriters, designers, developers, and account managers all play in harmony. This involves:
Defining scope: Clearly outlining project goals, tasks, and deliverables to prevent scope creep.
Resource allocation: Assigning the right talent to the right tasks and managing team workload to avoid burnout.
Client communication: Serving as the primary point of contact, managing client expectations, and creating a smooth feedback loop.
Workflow management: Establishing efficient agency project management processes and workflows to keep the project moving forward.
Financial oversight: Handling budgeting, tracking expenses, and ensuring the project remains profitable.
Essentially, it’s the operational backbone that allows creativity to flourish without descending into chaos.
Why is agency project management important?
Successful project management isn’t just a "nice-to-have"—it's a fundamental driver of success in any agency project. When implemented correctly, it delivers tangible benefits that ripple across the entire organization.
Improved client satisfaction and retention: Clear communication, predictable timelines, and consistent delivery build trust. When clients feel informed and confident in your process, they are more likely to become long-term partners.
Enhanced team productivity and morale: A well-managed project provides clarity and reduces stress. Teams with clear direction, balanced workloads, and efficient processes are happier, more collaborative, and more productive.
Increased profitability: By carefully managing project scope, resources, and budgets, you can prevent costly overruns and ensure that every project contributes to the bottom line. It’s the key to turning creative work into a sustainable business.
Greater scalability and growth: Standardized agency project management processes and templates make it easier to onboard new team members and take on more projects without sacrificing quality. It creates a blueprint for success that can be replicated as your agency grows.
This is where a unified platform becomes a game-changer. By centralizing communication and tasks, Lark ensures that strategic planning in Lark Docs and real-time project tracking in Lark Base are seamlessly connected, eliminating information silos and boosting overall efficiency.
The process of an effective agency management
Successful projects don't happen by accident. They follow structured, repeatable agency project management processes that ensure clarity and alignment at every turn. While every agency has its unique flavor, the most effective agency project management lifecycles generally follow these five key stages. These project management practices are crucial for successful project management.
1. Discovery and scoping
This is the foundation of the entire agency project. It begins with deep-diving into the client’s needs, goals, and client expectations. The primary output of this stage is a detailed project scope or statement of work (SOW) that clearly defines the project objectives, project deliverables, timelines, and budget. Getting this right is critical for preventing misunderstandings and scope creep later on.
2. Planning and resource allocation
With a clear scope in hand, the project planning phase of project management begins. This involves breaking down the agency project into smaller, manageable tasks and creating a detailed project timeline, often using tools like Gantt charts. You'll assign tasks to team members, set deadlines for each milestone, and finalize the budget. This is also where you manage resources, from the project team and project management software to any external vendor costs.
3. Execution and monitoring
This is where the work gets done. The creative team begins executing their tasks, and the agency project manager’s role shifts to monitoring project progress, facilitating collaboration, and managing communication. This phase of project management includes holding regular check-ins, using project tracking tools to track progress against the timeline, and keeping both internal teams and external stakeholders informed. Proactive risk management helps identify potential risks before they become major problems.
4. Delivery and reporting
As milestones are completed, project deliverables are presented to the client for client feedback and approval. This stage of agency project management involves managing the revision control process and ensuring the final work meets the agreed-upon standards. Throughout this phase, and at the project's conclusion, reporting & analytics become key. You’ll track KPIs and project insights to demonstrate value to the client and inform future projects.
5. Review and invoicing
Once the final deliverable is approved and the agency project is complete, the final steps are to conduct a post-project review or retrospective. This helps identify what went well and what could be improved, fostering continuous improvement in your agency project management processes. Finally, the finance team issues the final invoice, closing out the project from a financial perspective.
An effective agency project management process relies on consistency, which is difficult to build from scratch. Lark simplifies this with customizable templates for project plans, client feedback logs, and reporting, providing a ready-made framework to streamline every stage.
7 best agency project management tools in 2025
Choosing the right project management tool is one of the most critical decisions an agency can make for its overall project management approach. The right project management software can streamline workflows, improve team collaboration, and provide the visibility needed to keep each agency project on track. The wrong project management tool can create more friction than it solves. To help you decide, we’ve evaluated the top agency project management tools on the market, each with its own strengths tailored to different agency needs for managing projects.
1. Lark
Overview
Lark is an all-in-one, collaborative superapp designed to eliminate the friction of switching between multiple tools. It uniquely combines real-time communication (chat, video meetings), collaborative documentation (docs, sheets), powerful data management, and task management into a single, integrated platform. For project management for marketing agency operations, this means your project planning, client conversations, task assignments, and performance dashboards all live in one ecosystem. This unified approach to project management provides a single source of truth, breaking down the information silos that often plague agency work and fostering seamless team collaboration between creative teams, account managers, and clients.
Key features
Integrated communication and collaboration: Lark’s powerful messenger is built for teams, with features like auto-translation for global clients, threaded replies to keep conversations organized, and the ability to turn any message into a trackable task. Video conferencing includes AI-powered subtitles, transcription, and Magic Share, which allows teams to co-edit a document directly within the video call window, perfect for live client feedback sessions.
Centralized project hubs with Lark Base: Build custom, no-code databases to manage anything from an agency project and resource allocation to content calendars and bug tracking. Visualize your data with different views like Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and galleries to get the exact insights you need for your project management.
Dynamic and collaborative documents: Go beyond static documents with Lark Docs. You can embed rich content like polls, checklists, mind maps, and even live-updating databases directly into your project plans, creative briefs, or meeting notes, ensuring everyone is always working with the most current information. This feature elevates the entire project management process.
Smart calendar and scheduling: The calendar syncs seamlessly with your chats and docs, making it easy to book meetings, check team capacity, and set reminders for important deadlines without ever leaving the app. This is essential for effective project management.
Customizable workflows and automation: Use Lark Flow to connect your apps and automate repetitive processes. Set up custom approval workflows for creative project deliverables or get automatic notifications in a chat group when a task status changes, saving valuable administrative time on any agency project.
Pricing
Free: Starter plan available for up to 20 users, including access to Lark Base and other core features.
Pro: Starts from $12/user/month; for growing teams, secure partner communication, and no-code workflows.
Enterprise: Custom pricing; for larger teams needing strong security and advanced management. 👉See Lark pricing
Best for
Agencies of all sizes that want to consolidate their tech stack, reduce software costs, and eliminate information silos. It's especially powerful for a modern ad agency project management system that requires tight integration between communication, planning, and execution, particularly for those with remote or hybrid teams. Its comprehensive approach to project management makes it a top-tier project management tool.
2. Asana
Image source: asana.com
Overview
Asana is a highly popular and visually intuitive project management tool designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work. It excels at breaking down large agency projects into manageable tasks and subtasks, providing clear visibility into who is doing what, by when. Its clean interface and flexible views—including lists, boards, timelines (Gantt charts), and calendars—make it a favorite among creative and marketing agencies that need to manage complex, multi-stage projects with many moving parts. This tool is a strong option for pure project management.
Key features
Multiple project views: Switch between list, board, timeline, and calendar views to visualize work in the way that makes the most sense for you and your project team. The timeline view is particularly useful for mapping out project dependencies.
Portfolios and workload management: Group related projects into portfolios to get a high-level overview of project health and track progress. The workload feature helps you see how much work team members have across projects to prevent burnout and reallocate tasks as needed.
Automation rules: Create rules to automate routine tasks, such as assigning tasks, updating statuses, or moving tasks between project sections, which helps streamline workflows and reduce manual effort.
Pricing
Free: Up to 10 teammates
Starter: Starts from $10.99/user/month
Advanced: Starts from $24.99/user/month
Enterprise: Custom pricing
Best for
Marketing and creative agencies that manage multiple projects simultaneously and need a powerful project management tool for task visualization and resource management to keep everything organized.
3. Trello
Image source: trello.com
Overview
Trello is famous for its simplicity and its card-based Kanban board interface. It provides a straightforward, visual way to manage projects and workflows. Users create boards for projects, lists for stages of the workflow (e.g., To Do, In Progress, Done), and cards for individual tasks. You can move cards between lists as work progresses. While it may not have the deep feature set of other agency project management tools, its ease of use and visual appeal make it a fantastic choice for teams that value simplicity and a clear, at-a-glance overview of their work.
Key features
Kanban boards: The core of Trello is its simple and intuitive drag-and-drop Kanban boards, which make managing workflows incredibly easy for any agency project.
Butler automation: Trello’s built-in automation, Butler, can handle repetitive tasks by creating rule-based triggers, calendar commands, and due date commands to save time.
Power-ups: Enhance your boards by integrating with other apps your team uses, such as Slack, Google Drive, and Jira. These "Power-Ups" add functionality like custom fields, calendars, and reporting to your boards.
Pricing
Free: Up to 10 collaborators/workspace.
Standard: Starts from $5/user/month.
Premium: Starts from $10/user/month.
Enterprise: Starts from $17.5/user/month.
Best for
Small agencies, freelancers, or teams that need a simple, highly visual project management tool for managing straightforward creative workflows and content pipelines.
4. Jira
Image source: atlassian.com
Overview
Originally built for software development teams, Jira has become a powerful project management tool for all types of projects, especially those that follow an Agile methodology. It offers deep customization and robust features for planning, tracking, and releasing work. Its strength lies in its support for Scrum and Kanban frameworks, making it ideal for agencies with development teams or those that have adopted agile practices for their marketing and creative projects. The learning curve can be steeper than other tools, but its power is unmatched for technical project management.
Key features
Agile frameworks support: Out-of-the-box support for Scrum and Kanban boards, including features for managing backlogs, planning sprints, and tracking burndown charts.
Customizable workflows: Create highly customized workflows that match your agency's exact project management processes, from creative approval to client feedback and final delivery.
Advanced reporting: Generate a wide range of reports—from sprint reports to velocity charts—to get deep insights into your team’s performance and project progress.
Pricing
Free: Up to 10 users.
Standard: Starts from $8/user/month.
Premium: Starts from $14/user/month.
Enterprise: Custom pricing
Best for
Agencies with an in-house team of developers or those that have fully embraced agile project management methods for their marketing or ad agency project management.
5. Monday.com
Image source: monday.com
Overview
Monday.com is a colorful and highly customizable "Work OS" that allows teams to build their own workflows for projects, tasks, and processes. It’s known for its user-friendly interface and its ability to adapt to a wide variety of use cases, from project management for marketing agency campaigns to CRM and resource planning. It combines the visual appeal of Trello with the more robust features of Asana, making it a strong all-around contender for agencies that want flexibility and a central place to manage all aspects of their work. This flexibility is key for agency project management.
Key features
Highly customizable boards: Build boards with dozens of column types to track anything from deadlines and statuses to budgets and client contact info for any agency project.
Multiple data visualizations: View your data as Kanban boards, Gantt charts, calendars, or workload views to get the perspective you need. Dashboards pull data from multiple boards for a high-level overview.
Extensive automation and integrations: Automate routine work with "if-this-then-that" style recipes and integrate with a wide range of third-party tools.
Pricing
Free: Up to 3 boards
Basic: Starts from $9/seat/month
Standard: Starts from $12/seat/month
Pro: Starts from $19/seat/month
Enterprise: Custom pricing
Best for
Agencies that need a highly flexible and visually engaging platform that can be customized for a wide range of workflows beyond just project management, such as client management and creative operations.
6. ClickUp
Image source: clickup.com
Overview
ClickUp markets itself as "one app to replace them all," aiming to provide a comprehensive suite of productivity and agency project management tools in a single platform. It’s incredibly feature-rich, offering everything from task lists and Kanban boards to documents, spreadsheets, and goal tracking. Its hierarchical structure—Spaces, Folders, Lists, and Tasks—allows for granular organization, and its high degree of customization means you can tailor the platform to almost any workflow. For agencies looking for a single project management tool that can do nearly everything, ClickUp is a powerful option.
Key features
15+ customizable views: View your work in over 15 ways, including List, Board, Calendar, Gantt, and Mind Map, giving your project team ultimate flexibility.
Built-in docs and whiteboards: Create documents, wikis, and knowledge bases directly within ClickUp. The whiteboard feature is great for brainstorming and collaborative sessions.
Goal tracking: Set and track project objectives for your team and link them to specific tasks to see how daily work contributes to larger agency objectives.
Pricing
Free: Best for personal use
Unlimited: Starts from $7/user/month
Business: Starts from $12/user/month
Enterprise: Custom pricing
Best for
Tech-savvy agencies that want an all-encompassing, highly customizable platform and aren't afraid of a project management tool with a lot of features and options to configure.
7. Microsoft Project
Image source: microsoft.com
Overview
Microsoft Project is one of the original and most powerful project management tools on the market. It is a traditional and robust solution best suited for large, complex projects that require meticulous project planning, scheduling, and resource management. It is the gold standard for creating detailed Gantt charts, managing critical paths, and handling intricate dependencies. While it may lack the modern, collaborative feel of other tools, its depth in scheduling and financial management is unparalleled, making it a staple in more structured or enterprise-level agency project management.
Key features
Advanced scheduling and Gantt charts: Unmatched capabilities for creating detailed project timelines, defining task dependencies, and identifying the critical path.
Resource management: Sophisticated tools for assigning resources, managing workloads, and forecasting resource needs across multiple projects.
Budget and cost tracking: Integrate financial data to manage project budget, track actual costs against planned costs, and perform earned value analysis.
Pricing
No free plan; offers a free trial for one month
Microsoft planner: Included in Microsoft 365
Planner plan 1: Starts from $10/user/month
Planner and project plan 3: Starts from $30/user/month
Planner and project plan 5: Starts from $55/user/month
Best for
Large agencies or those managing enterprise-level projects with strict compliance, complex scheduling, and detailed budget-tracking requirements. Their project management demands are highly specific.
How Lark templates empower your agency project management
Starting from scratch on every agency project is a recipe for inefficiency. This is where the power of templates comes in. Lark offers a rich library of pre-built, customizable templates that provide a structured foundation for your agency's most common workflows, ensuring consistency and saving countless hours on project management.
Project Roadmap Gantt Chart: For agencies, visualizing the entire project timeline is non-negotiable. This template allows you to map out every phase, from initial discovery to final delivery. You can assign tasks, set deadlines, and track dependencies in a clear, visual format. It provides stakeholders and clients with an at-a-glance understanding of progress, ensuring everyone is aligned on the project schedule. 👉Use this template
Kanban board (with AI): Creative workflows are rarely linear. A Kanban board is perfect for managing the flow of tasks in a design or content sprint. This template lets you visualize work in stages like "Briefing," "In Progress," "Client Review," and "Approved." The added AI functionality can offer intelligent suggestions to optimize your workflow, helping you spot bottlenecks and improve team's efficiency over time. 👉Use this template
Task management: This comprehensive template is a project manager's central command. It combines a task list, a status Kanban board, a progress Gantt chart, and a calendar all in one. You can prioritize tasks, track individual progress, and see upcoming deadlines at a glance. It ensures that no detail falls through the cracks, from a minor copy edit to a major campaign launch. 👉Use this template
Project Problem Tracker: Issues are inevitable in any project. What matters is how you handle them. This template provides a structured system to document, assign, and track problems as they arise. By defining a handler, a resolution timeline, and an approver for each issue, you create a transparent and accountable process that reassures clients that you are proactively managing risk. 👉Use this template
Common challenges with agency project management
Even with the best agency project management tools and processes, agency project management is filled with potential risks. Being aware of these common challenges is the first step toward overcoming them and achieving project success.
Scope creep: This is the classic agency nightmare. A new project starts with a clear set of deliverables, but slowly, new requests and changes are added without adjusting the timeline or budget. It's often a result of vague initial briefs or a lack of a formal change management process.
Inefficient resource allocation: Assigning the right people to the right projects at the right time is a constant puzzle. Overloading your top performers leads to burnout, while underutilizing other team members is inefficient. Without a clear view of everyone's workload, it’s easy to make poor allocation decisions in your project management.
Poor client communication and feedback loops: Misunderstandings, delayed feedback, and a lack of transparency can quickly sour client relationships. Managing client expectations and creating a smooth, structured process for feedback and approvals is essential but often difficult to maintain across multiple projects.
Lack of visibility and disconnected tools: When your team's communication, task lists, files, and project plans are scattered across different apps, it's impossible to get a clear, real-time view of project health. This leads to wasted time searching for information and decisions being made on outdated data.
Many of these project management hurdles stem from disconnected systems. Lark addresses this by integrating chat, tasks, docs, and calendars, creating a single source of truth that mitigates scope creep and enhances visibility for all stakeholders.
Conclusion
Mastering agency project management is the most impactful step you can take to elevate your operations. It connects brilliant creative ideas with profitable, successful outcomes. By implementing a structured approach, you not only deliver every agency project on time and budget but also build lasting trust with clients and foster a healthier, more productive environment for your team.
The journey begins with solid processes, but modern agency work demands technology that removes friction. To truly thrive, you need a system that unifies communication, planning, and execution. Instead of juggling apps, a single source of truth drives clarity, enhances client relationships, and ensures project success. For agencies ready to build a more streamlined future, Lark provides the all-in-one platform to make it happen.
FAQs
What is the difference between an agency project manager and an account manager?
An account manager focuses on the client relationship, strategic growth, and satisfaction. A project manager, on the other hand, focuses on the internal execution of the project—managing timelines, resources, and budget to ensure deliverables are completed successfully. While their roles often overlap, the project manager is the internal orchestrator.
How do you measure the success of agency project management?
Success is measured by KPIs like on-time delivery, budget variance, and client satisfaction. A more strategic approach frames these metrics within an OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework, aligning project success with agency goals. For instance, an objective might be "Enhance Client Partnership," with key results tied to satisfaction scores and on-time delivery.
Should our agency use Agile or Waterfall for projects?
Choose Waterfall for projects with a fixed scope, clear requirements, and a linear path, like a website build with a locked design. Use Agile for projects where requirements are expected to evolve, such as ongoing content marketing or app development, as it allows for flexibility and iterative progress.
How do we handle scope creep once it's been identified?
When scope creep occurs, first document the new request and assess its impact on the timeline, budget, and resources. Then, present these findings clearly to the client. This allows you to have a constructive conversation about either adjusting the project scope (and cost) or prioritizing the new request over existing tasks.
Do small agencies need a dedicated project manager?
While a dedicated PM might not be feasible for very small agencies, the function of project management is still essential. A team member, often a founder or lead creative, must take on these responsibilities. Using a robust project management tool can help streamline this role until you're ready to hire.
