The best software for planning and capacity within marketing and creative agencies

What software does a marketing agency need?

A marketing agency usually uses several types of software. Think of a CRM for sales, time-tracking software, communication software and, of course, tools for organising projects and work.

When it comes to planning day-to-day work, it mainly comes down to one question:

Do you primarily want to manage tasks, or do you also want to get a handle on the capacity behind those tasks?

For a small team with a limited number of projects, simple task management may be enough. But as soon as you are running multiple client projects at the same time and allocating employees across those projects, it becomes a different story.

Then you want to know, for example:

• Who still has capacity next week
• How much capacity the design team has next month
• Which projects need the same developer at the same time
• Where people are becoming overloaded
• Can we actually take on that new client project?
• What happens to other deadlines if a project runs two weeks late?

That is why, for growing marketing and creative agencies, software that brings together project planning, resource planning and capacity planning is particularly useful.

Because having enough hours available does not automatically mean you have the right hours available.

Available capacity is not always the right capacity

Suppose your agency still has 160 hours available next month. A new website project is expected to take 100 hours. That should fit, right?

Until you take a closer look. Of those 100 hours, you might need 40 hours of design and 35 hours of development. The agency has enough capacity overall, but the developers are almost fully booked. There are only 16 development hours available.

So your problem is not the total capacity. You lack capacity within a specific specialism. This is common at marketing and creative agencies. You cannot simply replace a designer with a SEA specialist. And your developer probably will not be too thrilled if you ask them to spend the afternoon editing three social media videos.

Good planning software should therefore not only show available hours, but help you connect people, specialisms, projects and capacity.

Why isn’t standard project management software always enough?

Project management software helps you organise work. You create projects and tasks, assign responsibilities, set deadlines and track progress.

That is important. But for many agencies, one crucial element is still missing: does our planning actually have the capacity to handle this work?

A task can be neatly assigned to Lisa with Friday set as the deadline. But if Lisa is already planned for 40 hours that week, all you have really done is document exactly where the problem lies.

Project management is mainly about what needs to be done

With project management software, you usually answer questions such as:

• Which tasks are still outstanding?
• Who is responsible?
• What is the deadline?
• What is the status?
• Which tasks belong to which project?
• Which activities depend on each other?

This gives you control over the execution of a project.

Capacity planning is about feasibility

With capacity planning, you also look at the people and available time behind the work. For example, you want to know:

• How many hours is someone available?
• How much work is already planned?
• Which specialist do you need?
• When does capacity become available?
• Who is at risk of becoming overloaded?
• Where is there still spare capacity?
• What happens when work is moved?

This gives you control over the feasibility of your planning. For an agency with five employees and a handful of projects, that difference may still be relatively small. With twenty, thirty or fifty employees working on dozens of client projects, it suddenly becomes much more important.

What should software for a marketing agency offer?

Not every agency works in the same way. Even so, there are a number of features that are particularly important when choosing software for marketing agencies.

Planning multiple client projects at the same time

Agencies almost never work on just one project at a time. One designer might work on a new visual identity on Monday, a campaign on Tuesday and a website on Wednesday. Meanwhile, feedback rounds are still ongoing for three other clients.

That is why you need an overall view. You want to see not only what is happening within a single client project, but also how all projects together are using your team’s capacity. This prevents three project managers from independently planning the same designer for Thursday afternoon.

View capacity by employee or team

An important feature of planning software for agencies is insight into available capacity. You want to be able to quickly answer questions such as:

• Who still has capacity next week?
• How many development hours are available in October?
• When do design and development have capacity at the same time?
• Which colleagues are consistently planned beyond their capacity?

Without this insight, capacity is soon determined by asking around, using separate spreadsheets and relying heavily on memory. With capacity planning, availability becomes concrete and you can plan further ahead.

Planning different specialisms

Not every available employee is suitable for every job. A marketing or creative agency might work with:

• project managers;
• designers;
• copywriters;
• strategists;
• developers;
• SEO specialists;
• SEA specialists;
• social media marketers;
• video producers.

That is why you need to see not only how much capacity is available, but more importantly what type of capacity is available. This makes resource planning important. Rather than simply allocating hours to people, you match the right work with the right specialist.

Monitoring deadlines and progress

Capacity is only one side of the story. Of course, you also want to know how projects are progressing. Which activities are going according to plan? Which tasks are delayed? Which deadline is approaching? And which project needs extra attention?

By combining planning and progress, you can see not only what you planned in advance, but also what is actually happening.

Being able to replan quickly

Planning within an agency rarely stays the same for long. A client provides input too late. Feedback takes three days longer. A campaign suddenly needs to go live earlier. A colleague is unavailable. Or a ‘small adjustment’ turns out to be a completely new landing page.

Sound familiar?

That is why good planning software for marketing agencies needs to be flexible. When work shifts, you want to be able to replan easily and immediately see what that means for other work, employees and deadlines.

Using different planning views

A project manager looks at the planning differently from a team leader or employee. One person wants a Kanban board showing the status of work. Another wants to view a timeline. A planner, on the other hand, wants to know how busy the team will be over the coming weeks. Multiple planning views help everyone look at the same work from the perspective of their own role.

Comparing planned time with hours spent

No matter how well you plan, an estimate remains an estimate. That is why it is valuable to compare planned time with the time ultimately spent on the work.

Does a certain type of campaign consistently require more design hours? Or do you repeatedly underestimate development time for website projects? If so, you can plan future projects more realistically. This not only improves your planning, but also benefits your quotes and margins.

Planning recurring work

Not every client project has a clear start and end date. Many marketing agencies work with retainers or recurring work such as:

• monthly SEO work;
• social media content;
• advertising optimisations;
• reports;
• newsletters;
• website maintenance.

You do not want to manually plan this work again every month. Recurring activities save time and prevent regular client work from getting lost amongst all the other projects.

What does capacity planning look like in practice within a creative agency?

Suppose you work at a creative digital agency with 30 employees and 40 active client projects. The team includes designers, developers, marketers, copywriters and project managers. On Monday, a request comes in for a new website. It is a great project, and sales naturally wants to know when the agency can start.

You look at the overall planning and see that there are enough hours available in six weeks’ time. Problem solved? Not quite.

The real question is not: "Do we have 200 hours available in six weeks?"

But: "Do the right designers and developers have enough capacity during the same period?"

Perhaps design has capacity in weeks one and two, while development is not available until week four. Meanwhile, an existing website project is delayed by two weeks because another client provides their content late. This also changes the available capacity for the new project.

And there goes your planning.

With good resource and capacity planning, you can spot these kinds of bottlenecks earlier. You can move work, allocate capacity differently or agree on a realistic start date before anything is promised to the client.

What types of software are available for marketing and creative agencies?

When searching for software for a marketing agency, you will quickly come across dozens of tools. From simple task lists to complete agency management platforms.

Broadly speaking, there are four types of software:

1. Project management software
   Best suited to: teams that want to organise projects and tasks.
   Strong in: tasks, deadlines, workflows and collaboration.
2. Resource and capacity planning
   Best suited to: agencies with many shared specialists.
   Strong in: availability, utilisation and workload.
3. PSA or agency management software
   Best suited to: agencies that want to combine many business processes.
   Strong in: projects, hours, budgets and business operations.
4. Planning software 
   Best suited to: agencies that want to plan work, people and capacity together.
   Strong in: visual planning, resources, capacity and progress.

Which category is the best fit depends on the problem you are trying to solve.

When should you choose project management software?

Project management software is a good fit if your main challenge is:

Who does what and when does it need to be finished?

You use the software to divide projects into tasks, assign responsibilities, set up workflows and monitor deadlines. For smaller teams or agencies where employees largely work on fixed projects, this may be sufficient.

When should you choose resource and capacity planning?

Resource planning becomes important as soon as multiple projects compete for the same employees or specialisms. Your question then changes from:

"Which tasks do we need to complete?"

to:

"Who has capacity to complete them, and when?"

For agencies with many client projects running in parallel, that is an important distinction.

When should you choose PSA or agency management software?

PSA stands for Professional Services Automation. This type of software aims to bring together various processes within professional services businesses.

Depending on the software, this may include projects, resources, hours, budgets, reporting and invoicing. This can be useful if you want to organise many business processes within a single system. If you are primarily looking for an accessible solution for operational planning, such a comprehensive package may offer more than you need.

When should you choose planning software?

Planning software is useful when you want to bring work and capacity together visually. 

You can then see not only which projects and activities there are, but also when work is planned, who is responsible for it and how much capacity is available.

This gives you a single overview that brings together planning, resources and execution.

When is Excel no longer suitable for planning at a marketing agency?

Excel can work surprisingly well for quite a long time. Particularly with a small team, a spreadsheet is quick to create, flexible and familiar to everyone. The problem usually does not arise because Excel suddenly becomes "wrong". It arises when the organisation changes faster than the spreadsheet can keep up.

Do you recognise several of these situations?

• The planner is the only person who fully understands how the file works.
• There are multiple versions of the same planning.
• Capacity is calculated manually.
• Changes require a lot of rearranging.
• Employees find it difficult to view the latest planning themselves.
• Tasks are kept in a project management tool, while capacity is managed in Excel.
• Hours are recorded somewhere else again.
• Capacity problems only become visible when deadlines are already at risk.

Then it is probably time to look at an Excel alternative for your marketing agency. Not because spreadsheets are bad, but because planning has now become a shared process.

How do you prevent employees from becoming overloaded within an agency?

You can prevent employees from becoming overloaded by comparing available capacity with the work that is already planned. That sounds simple. In practice, it becomes more difficult when one employee is working for five clients at the same time.

A good approach consists of a few steps:

1. Record the available capacity for each employee.
2. Make realistic estimates for work.
3. Plan work across all client projects.
4. Review the workload for each employee and team.
5. Look a few weeks or months ahead as well.
6. Reallocate work before someone consistently exceeds their available capacity.
7. When changes occur, check the impact on other projects.

This is how you use capacity planning to stay ahead of problems.

How do you plan multiple client projects at the same time?

Planning multiple client projects starts with one overall view. If each project is planned entirely separately from the rest, you will not see that the same people are needed in different places. Therefore, do not plan work only within individual projects, but also view it across all projects.

Assign activities to employees or teams, add a realistic time estimate and compare that planned workload with the available capacity.

This allows you to see more quickly:

• which projects require the same resources at the same time;
• where capacity is available;
• where deadlines clash;
• which employee is becoming overloaded;
• when a new project can realistically start.

This not only makes your planning clearer, but also more reliable for your clients.

Which software combines project planning and capacity planning?

Software that combines project planning and capacity planning brings planned work and available people together in the same environment. For example, you can see:

• which projects are in progress;
• which activities are planned;
• who is working on them;
• how much capacity is available;
• how heavy employees’ workloads are;
• how the work is progressing;
• where delays are occurring;
• what needs to move when priorities change.

For marketing and creative agencies with lots of work running in parallel, this combination is often more valuable than separate systems for tasks and capacity.

When is vPlan a good fit for a marketing or creative agency?

vPlan is particularly well suited to agencies where project planning, capacity, resources and progress are closely interconnected. For example, when you:

• run multiple client projects at the same time;
• allocate employees across different projects;
• want to know in advance how much capacity is available;
• work with different disciplines and specialisms;
• want to gain insight into workloads;
• regularly need to replan work;
• want to organise planning and execution from a single environment.

With vPlan, you plan work visually and view the planning in different ways. This gives you an overview not only of what needs to be done, but also when it is planned and who will be working on it.

This allows you to better align capacity and work and respond more quickly when the planning changes. Does that automatically make vPlan the best software for every marketing agency? No.

If you are only looking for a simple task list, a straightforward project management tool may be perfectly adequate. And if you want one comprehensive system for virtually all your business operations, including extensive financial processes, specialised PSA software may be a better fit.

But if your biggest planning challenge sounds something like:

"We have enough people, projects and tools, but we lack an overview of who has capacity and when." 

Then it makes sense to look at software that brings planning and capacity together.

Get a grip on projects and capacity

A growing marketing agency usually has no shortage of task lists. The real challenge begins when multiple clients, projects, deadlines and specialists are competing for the same capacity.

Which designer has capacity next week? When can development start? Can you fit that new campaign into the planning? Where will a bottleneck arise next month? And what happens to everything else if one project is delayed by two weeks?

Good software for marketing agencies therefore helps you not only determine what needs to be done. It also gives you insight into who can do the work, how much capacity is available and what changes mean for the rest of the planning.

With vPlan, you bring planning, capacity, resources and progress together. This turns "I think it should fit" into planning you can actually manage.

Curious to see what that looks like for your agency? Discover vPlan or plan a demo and experience how you can plan projects and capacity together.