11.04.2010How to structure a digital agency by Rob Smith
Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes
It’s clear from some of the traffic coming to this blog that there seem to be quite a few people wondering how to structure a digital agency – what the options are and therefore the pros and the cons. I thought I’d write a quick post from my experience of running an (albeit small) digital agency and how we work, and other models I’ve also seen around.
How does Blueleaf Digital work?
Well as a small, collaborative team we have the standard parts: design, development, project management, admin.
We work together, close to each other, and so there’s constant communication between all departments that is face to face. This works really well for us because we can get together and sort problems or challenges out quickly and easily by calling a quick 5 minute get together.
Generally websites go from sales to planning and project management to design to development to testing to launch. They go back and forth between project management, design and development. Our process is shown below. We’re always tweaking and changing it but this is our latest iteration (click to enlarge):
This is really just a website process however, it’s not the same process we use for all types of project. Having said that, a lot of variables remain the same.
For a small agency, this is generally the structure, a highly collaborative single team that works together an is pretty agile.
What happens when you get bigger?
As an agency gets bigger, I’ve seen three different routes to structure the agency, and there are some pros and cons of each method.
1) Big teams approach
You can keep growing each team, design team, development team, copy team, creative team, and so on. Each team just keeps getting bigger, and there is a lead in each team that distributes the work the team needs to do.
Pros: Easy to manage and build, great depth of knowledge in one place
Cons: Builds a our team is better than yours / competition by discipline
2) Mini discrete teams
Build lots of different teams that work together on a variety of projects, a PM, some designers, some developers. Small and agile, this method mirrors a lot of smaller agencies, in effect creating a small agency feel within a big organisation.
Pros: Small and agile, good teamwork
Cons: Not a great depth of knowledge per team, team does things same way each time
3) Mini teams with swapping
This is a variation of the 2, with the team being formed on a per project basis. This means that each member of the organisation will be on several teams doing several projects at once.
Pros: Small and agile team, broad experience due to working in many teams
Cons: A lot of resource management required to know where resource gaps are
As we grow, we’ll be looking at option 2 primarily, and maybe give 3 a go for a while if we get much bigger. It;s important that our structure:
- Motivates our staff
- Keeps feeding them different work
- Keeps feeding different peoples viewpoints and experience
- Keeps overheads and administration costs to a minimum
Comments welcome on how your agency may be structured, or how you feel it should be!
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