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!

This week I attended one of the Marketing Industry Network events in Manchester which discussed the future of the independent digital agency. The panel including agencies like Cool Pink, Code Computerlove and Chapter8 and come question time I asked whether the change within the industry is been driven by clients or agencies. It was interesting discussion and inspired this post which will explore how the structure of the two sides of the agency/client relationship seem to affect the working relationship, projects undertaken, and results gathered.

We’ll cover this is this order:

• Agency structure
• Client structure
• How this affects projects and results
• The future

Agency structure

Agencies can obviously be structured in many different ways and there are probably more ways than I could ever think of. Having said this however we can normally say that there is what is seen as a standard agency model driven by departments.

One department does the creative, one the technical build, one the testing / QA, one media planning and so on. Projects are passed from department to department to be worked on and generally go back and forth. The departments don’t always communicate that much with each other. They are lead by the account director or executive who’s the communication path to the client. This model is a pretty natural output of a growing company in it’s attempt to cope with scale.

I will call the above the silo approach. Team’s are quite separate and not all that collaborative.

The other way of working is focused much more on collaboration. Whether it’s a lot of smaller teams with someone from each discipline in each, or, in the case of a smaller company, one giant collaborative team.

Client structure

A similar situation exists within clients as well. A spectrum between collaborative and silo based organisations. The difference with clients is also where the decision makers lie for different projects. Where they lie can make a dramatic difference to what projects are prioritised and why, and how the relationship can be affected.

First lets discuss structure. In my experience there are a lot of different structure possibilities within organisations and a lot of this is dependent on how they have grown. Here’s a couple that we have come across in charge:

• Business managers / Business development
• Direct Business (If the company has a retail arm)
• Managing director / CEO
• Marketing
• Ecommerce
• IT

It makes such a huge difference who is responsible for a digital/ecommerce project as to the results which we’ll discuss later. The stereotypes of the above departments / decision makers can be very true. IT are generally more interested in how much work it means for them and security (rightly so), business development and CEOs are very much about the bottom line and marketing tend to be more aesthetically orientated.

The key with how the client is structured however is less who is the point of contact, and more about the level of collaboration within the organisation. If each part hardly ever talks, it means something very different to if they have regular catch up and joint planning.

How this affects projects and results

If you’ve worked at any agency for a period of time, you know some projects go better than others, some seem simpler, even hen the project is more complex. Often the less complex the project, in a paradoxical way, can be harder.

I believe that the alignment of client and agency structure can play a big part in how well they work together. You could argue that a good account handler should protect the agency and client from any differences that can cause friction. To a certain extent that’s true. I do believe though, that the underlying structure and therefore culture of the organisations will always come out.

Combo One – Collaborative client, Silo agency

If a collaborative client tries to work well with a silo’d agency, they will become frustrated that things cannot be more collaborative. They will crave to have good, productive meetings with all of their major players, and all of the agency’s major players.

Combo Two – Silo client, Collaborative agency

If a silo’d client tries to work with a  collaborative agency, the agency will become frustrated by the fact their ideas and forward thinking fall often on deaf hears depending on the contact within the client. Ideas and work are constantly filtered through their eyes resulting in their view dominating. When work is finally presented often other organisation stakeholders are disappointed as it’s so focused from one area. More work for the agency.

Combo Three – Silo client, Silo agency

If a silo’d agency works with silo’d client, things go very, very slowly. Communication is drawn out, Chinese whispers are prevalent. Work takes a long time to get done and there’s a lot of back and forth from agency to client and inter department within both client an agency. Even after a drawn out process, the work produced will end up not really pleasing anyone either side unless there’s on dominant personality as the client contact.

Combo Four – Collaborative client, Collaborative agency

If a collaborative agency works with a collaborative client, projects can go exceptionally well (in our experience). The stakeholders get round the table and talk out what they want from the project. Everyone’s views get aired and they feel like they have been heard. The agency then works together on the project, discussing the possibilities for the project. Again, all parts get heard and discussed. Projects move faster and results are generally better. There are a couple of caveats. Trying to get all the stakeholders together can be difficult and therefore slow things down waiting for a meeting. Sometimes both clients and agencies can get too many people involved with too many view, and a project can lose direction and clarity. You can never please everyone.

Conclusion and the future

So what does this mean? We can’t all magic the right clients or change our current clients, organisational change takes time. I think one of things all agencies need to realise is that one of the reasons digital agencies seem to be doing well is that their attitude to collaboration and change. Digital moves so fast as an industry, that the agency has to be collaborative and good at change. This helps them with clients as well, to learn and adapt.

In my opinion, all agencies must work hard to be as collaborative as possible and encourage clients to do the same.

This is unashamedly inspired by Sam Barne’s 7 deadly sins of web project management. While Sam wrote his post from the position of being a project manager on the agency side (as you would expect), this post is concentrating on being a help for the client side. It is aimed at providing a guide to 7 things to avoid when planning and executing a new web project.

Gluttony – do not over specify your features

The first of the deadly sins, Gluttony, appears in the form of over specifying a website project. This could be the big chance to produce something that is forward thinking, innovative and solves all the issues your organisation may have.

While the first two parts of the above sentence should apply to every new project where possible, the last can easily be any new project’s downfall. This is due to the time it takes to execute such a complex project, and the time taken to organise it. Once all that time has been taken and the project is launched, a lot of the thoughts and things asked for are no longer needed, or possibly out of date.

The solution to this is centered around phasing a project and not worrying about the specific, finite details of future phases that are in the medium to long term future. Concentrate hard on the current phase while keeping in mind your long term goals. Launch phases of the project in quick iterations, taking feedback and improving as you go.

The most important thing to remember is that your users will tell you the direction to go in terms of their feedback both send to you, and through your analytics. Even the best and most insightful thought leaders and managers cannot predict with any great accuracy what your users will do. You could specify 20 different features for your web project. Out of those 20, users may regularly use 3, and ignore the rest that you spent 80% of your effort on building.

Think about the long term, plan the short to medium term and launch often and gather feedback.

Greed – do not over stuff your content/products

Although it sounds very similar to gluttony, greed takes a different form when beginning a web project, in the form of content planning. Whether it’s how many pages of copy to describe your services, or how many products to add to your website, do not add too much.

It’s very easy to think when planning your site that everything should be on it to the nth degree. Every product, service and detail of what you do. This is untrue. Too much detail can easily put your users off more than help them.

Imagine you’re planning a ecommerce website. 20% of your products generate 80% of your revenue (not an uncommon situation). You put all of your products on the site. This means that your users find it harder to get to the products they want (the 80%) and so decreases your sales. Of course there are ways to organise and categorise your products to help this situation, but that’s not the point.

When it comes to both product and content, add your most important items in your first phase and launch with them. Ensure you’re getting those right before adding the others. When you do add the others, measure to ensure you haven’t had an adverse effect on the main products or content.

The bottom line is to make sure you add to your project what makes the biggest different to your bottom line first. Then look to the more fringe products in future phases.

Sloth/Melancholy – do not take your time at the start

It might feel like it. You’re planning a project that needs to be ready for 9 months time for instance. Seems so far away right now. This leads us to sloth. A sense of urgency is needed at the very start of the project, and milestones set very early on.

If you lose a day every month in a 9 month project you’ll be two working weeks over timescales by the end. And three weeks from the end is too late to add more resource or try and bring the project in on time.

The solution is to have the same rhythm and pace through the project and ensure you’re hitting your milestones; measure often and adjust quickly if there are issues.

Lust – do not give precedence to your own desires

As human beings, we’re all guilty of this sin in various ways. When planning a website project, it can be very easy to plan it from your point of view, at the detriment of others. Your lense on the world and this project varies wildly from that of others in your organisation, your users, suppliers, etc.

It’s important therefore to plan with an all inclusive perspective, and not let your own aspirations and thoughts as to what is and is not important cloud the overall direction of the project.

One possible solution is to engage the services of an outside organisation who has no bias towards any one department. They can bring the perspective needed to plan a fair project to achieve the organisation’s goals.

Pride – do not think you have to solve it all

Possibly the easiest sin for someone beginning a web project to fall foul of. You have been assigned the task of planning and executing this project – it’s easy to think that you should have all the answers. In reality, you don’t! No one does. Not even me.

The solution is to ensure you bring in the help you need. Get other perspectives, seek expert opinions, ask the questions you don’t think you should have to ask, and more. Make sure you are comfortable with what you are doing and not pretending you know more than you do. Generally, other people are very happy to help if you only ask.

Envy – do not copy your competition

This is easy to do. Your competition adds a new feature you hadn’t thought of yet or something you already have in the next phase. They might have done it slightly different or in your belief better. It’s easy to just ask someone to copy it. Don’t do it!

In all probability, your site has a slightly different customer profile, different needs and different priorities. Copying something else might not be appropriate. The more dangerous aspect is that the more you do this, the more your site will become a hotch potch of mixed execution styles, user interfaces and this all ultimately leads to confusion for the user.

The solution is to be inspired by your competition, appreciate what they do well, but not copy it.

Wrath – do not blame, collaborate

The final sin in this list, wrath can poision a project so quickly and is hard to recover from. If you have a blame culture within your project, everyone will be scared about being blamed for issues, and so no one will make a decision or take responsibility for anything. Delegation becomes exceptionally difficult.

When assembling your project team and planning it all out, make sure that you instill a culture of responsibility and honest reporting. No one will be blamed, issues need to be raised quickly and will be dealt with proactively.

For the past couple of years, digital has been touted as the thing that every marketeer should be focusing on and what was and is going to provide the best returns for marketing spend over time. The time has come to stop thinking of digital and offline marketing as separate entities and deciding that ‘digital is the way forwards’ because, quite frankly, that’s too narrow minded.

Data needs to be at the centre of all marketing strategy and really, it always has been under the guise of CRM, web analytics, etc. Now however companies need to recognise that all channels be they your website or email marketing, outdoor or TV, are all about driving useful data into the organisation to help shape and drive your message to your target market.

Minority report did it well. Remember where everyone was eye scanned and shown appropriate ads – to support that you need to integrate your data in an effective way to drive message.

Let’s look at the benefits of a clean, deep database of your clients:

- A deeper relationship with each client
- Greater ability for anyone in the organisation to help a client
- Much greater client retention and satisfaction
- Easier client growth via targeted messages

This, of course, is a much wider subject of good CRM and data management. However let’s not forget the key message here (coming from a Digital director) – digital channels should never be looked at in isolation, and should never be seen as the sole saviour of your marketing. It’s always deeper than that.

2008 to 2009 is really the emergence of streams into the common culture.

Let me explain what I mean. A stream is simply a set of information that is updated all the time by events, communication, conversation, anything that could be occurring right now. Generally a lot of people are now signed up to Facebook. The information you get when you sign into Facebook is effectively your Facebook life stream. It’s what you and your friends are doing, saying, feeling, thinking right now and it’s constantly updated. Twitter is another even faster moving example of a stream.

So if you’re a business – what does this mean to you? Well you need to think about what opportunities, if any, there are to fit into that stream. The online store Zappos does this really well. Anytime someone mentions Zappos on Twitter they reply to that, with a human response, saying thanks, or offering help. Great service, great response, great customer engagement. don’t go too far though or people will think you’re invaded their space – banks for instance are organisations that generally try to push their message, not listen to their audience and so can get caught out by this backlash of personal intrusion.

So, think about how your organisation could fit well into a life stream – but don’t push it. The best way is to use the stream to help a person or to spread word of mouth recommendations (of course this can work the other way!)