3 Processes We Implemented This Year To Save Time (and Save Our Clients Money)

Everybody would agree that having a few key metrics of success for any business will improve the quality of your product and the culture and commitment of your people. With half a decade of experience under our belts working as Toi, and more than 25 years of combined agency experience on our staff, we know this is true for most design and creative agencies.

But while it’s one thing to have success metrics for your final product, there are often a whole world of overlooked data points inherent in the process you use to build your final product.

So, over the last year, we decided to put everything we thought we knew about our process on the table in a series of meetings, and question it in an attempt to improve even the smallest of habits we’d built as a company. Below are three of the simplest—yet most valuable—takeaways we took from this exercise that we’d recommend for any agency or creative firm.

Collaborative Communication

Whether you realize it or not, keeping a steady and predictable line of communication open between you and your client is more than half the battle—in fact, it may be the battle. Because, no matter how effective your internal production processes are, a process can’t work if a client isn’t aware of it.

That said, inviting clients into something like Slack made us too available, making ourselves available for calls “oh, you know, whenever” made things utterly unpredictable, and relegating everything to Basecamp made everything too impersonal.

So we found a middle ground by implementing weekly status calls with all of our clients where we run through progress that’s been made, blockers we ran into (late feedback, unclear feedback, missing content, etc), and previewed what our focus would be for the next week.

Before we landed on this solution, we had experimented with a more traditional SCRUM approach that included short client calls almost every day, but that was exhausting—for us, and for our clients. The weekly scrum greatly improved our ability to smooth out kinks that otherwise would have caused delays and clogged the process, while also giving our team enough breathing room to make real progress on each request and log concerns, giving everyone on our team and the client’s team a voice and a platform to share concerns, updates to scope, and what rare Pokemon they caught over the weekend (we all know you love Pokemon Go too).

Another thing we realized during our review is that, unfortunately, our designers spent most of their time with other designers, developers with developers, and project managers with project managers.

So this kind of collaborative communication can’t just be between you and your client. Internal communication works the same way. And fixing this isn’t as easy as you might think it would be. You can’t just move away from email to Slack for internal communication, for example, and boom! everybody’s on the same page. After doing some digging, however, we found that if a stakeholder from every department was included in every meeting about the project from the beginning—even before we had officially signed the contract—our communication was more cohesive throughout the life of the project. So we restructured the on-boarding process to encourage the participation of full teams, thus giving our design, development, and strategy departments a chance to speak their mind on a process customized to the needs and APIs of the client, and hear everybody’s opinion. This meant that before we even started, all teams were on the same page about the size and scope of the project, and thus had less ground to make up after the project kicked off.

We obviously understood beforehand that every department and team member has something to offer. But it required us intentionally shifting our process to make sure the team was allowed to dig into the weeds of each project a little bit before we were even sure if we were going to land it, lending their talents and opinions to the creation of each project proposal. The end product has been much better since we implemented this process point.

Prototyping

We had moved to more sophisticated prototyping tools a few years ago, allowing our clients to see what our proposed designs would look like in a browser well before we had started development, which obviously cut down on the number of revisions we were making, since context is the hardest part if you’re just reviewing web comps via attached JPEG images.

But last year, we discovered Invision, and oh my word, it’s just the best. Beyond letting your clients feel like they’re clicking around an actual, developed site, Invision has the ability to show animations, and other front-end effects without you having to write a single line of front-end code.

Around the time we discovered Invision, we were evaluating Photoshop vs. Sketch. After testing it out for a few projects, we ended up on that bandwagon as well, and we’ve never had more flexibility when it comes to prototyping.

Sketch is an excellent dance partner with Invision, and exports responsive designs seamlessly, allowing for an easier transition to front-end development. This means our front-end teams (designers and front-end developers) are now working closer than ever before. Designers can design front-end prototypes, show them and get approval from our clients in Invision, and developers then have an approved visual reference for how things should look and function at various breakpoints in the browser.

This has streamlined our feedback and revisions process considerably.

Pricing Model

Before January of this year, our pricing model was based around hourly units. Clients came to us with a certain set of deliverables, we needed a certain number of hours to complete those deliverables. And that was that.

Only it wasn’t.

As any agency, or client that’s worked with an agency, is fully aware, deliverables inevitably change, hours inevitably add up, and everybody’s enthusiasm inevitably deflates when the amount of hours estimated doesn’t end up being the amount of hours necessary to complete the project. Then expectations have to be realigned (usually down), and agencies either have to cover costs to keep the client’s billable budget where it was estimated, or clients have to pay more money than they were initially quoted.

Lose-lose.

After thinking long and hard about it, and experimenting with a few different pricing models, we ultimately landed on something really simple: monthly service charges, depending on the services we were providing.

It was like a breath of fresh air. It allowed our teams to do whatever amount of work was required to make everything we produce amazing, and it meant our clients could rest assured that, unless we added a new service or the timeline went longer than had been agreed to by both parties, they weren’t going to have to worry about overage charges at all.

It’s allowed us to collectively agree on a product vision with our clients, and see that vision through, without having to stress about where every minute of every day is going.

Life’s a lot easier like that.

In Closing

We’re constantly looking to improve our processes. So it’s possible that if you ask us about something specifically mentioned in this post a year from now that we will have changed it. But if you’re an agency that’s looking for ways to improve how you work, or somebody with a project looking for an agency to tackle it with you, we just thought it might be worth something to share these simple ways we were able to improve both efficiencies and outcomes. We hope it was useful.