Managing a Consulting Digital Agency
By: Moses Kim
Tags: Outsourcing, Agile, Remote Development, Business Process, Software Development

Hiring a development agency is a decision made based on a number of aspects, the main ones being competence and price in most cases. Obviously, you want the best possible result at a reasonable cost. However, the quality of the result depends on a huge amount of factors and people’s decisions. It makes sense that sufficient consulting by a manager can shed light on the building process, open the perspective, and even inspire to thrive.

“If you know the way broadly you will see it in everything.”

― Miyamoto Musashi

Let’s try to figure out the things that constitute good project manager consulting service and ultimately make a trustworthy digital agency.

Premise

Every business owner sooner or later comes across the necessity of a software injection or online presence integrity. Unless dealt with on daily basis these are one of the most challenging and awarding endeavors and enterprise can indulge into.

The modern market offers solutions for every task you can imagine, from small template one-page websites for college-dorm-room startups to global software products for multinational corporations. One thing they all have in common is the representation of their abilities to its best. No doubt, a well established brand has its name speaking for itself, but supporting the relevance and constantly rising the bar for the entire industry is the main growth factor.

Whatever project you need executed, however large the purse is, and regardless of your technical knowledge and design vision, a transparent and comprehensive business consulting is the gateway task that a digital agency has to accomplish.

Digital Agency Consulting Services Checklist

Once you pick an agency as a prospect for your future project development, there are some things to settle before you get going:

Agency’s versatility

Is it a full-stack company with an established multi-layer team?

Does the agency provide creative service with UX design and UI implementation?

Does the agency throw in an individual project manager in charge of the entire life-cycle of a project?

Is there a QA engineering team? Or does the agency simply deliver code, or writes code and outsources the rest?

Negotiation & flexibility skills

Is the agency open to the client’s vision?

Does the agency show a good will to the client’s suggestions?

Does the agency do the research in the field of the client’s operation?

Human Resources policy

Does the agency have an in-house team?

Does the agency incorporate freelancers for particular tasks?

Is your project going to be run by a selected team of developers, or are they going to rotate according to the tasks?

Testimonials

Does the agency demonstrate honest reviews from clients?

Does the agency have a review presence online (Clutch.co, etc)

In-house operation

Does the agency provide code review service?

Does the agency take good care of its databases?

Does the agency perform safety procedures?

Does the company perform debugging services?

Digital Agency Information Transition Checklist

In order to transition intention into work and gain momentum you need to build in your hired digital agency into your business logic. This can be done gradually as the needs present themselves and consequently fill in all the gaps, or create another checklist and make sure the transition is done to-a-tee and nothing has been missed.

Hand over all the graphic designs you have and plan on using in your new project.

In order to foster your hired team’s perfect understanding of your company’s business logic, create sprints, features, user stories, and tasks, each describing the particular aspect at its level.

Provide the list of your biggest competition on the market and companies you look up to.

Set the deadlines and make a budget segmentation.

Determine which time & progress tracking tools (Jira, Trello, Hubstaff) you are going to use, along with syhronizations and hand-off tools (RealtimeBoard).

Define the principles of charging:

daily rates

fixed price

time & material basis

daily rates fixed price time & material basis Extend your corporate identity to the development team and build better bond.

Digital Agency Collaboration Checklist

Once everything has been clarified and the actual work begins, you are likely to encounter some pitfalls that might delay your product launch or set it back significantly. To avoid them, your collaboration skills have to be on point while following a direction towards smooth remote workflow.

Establish the scrum policy, settle the time, and develop the habit of productive meetings.

Work closely with your PM to make sure the project progress is being reported fully and honestly.

Keep in mind the big picture and isolate specific features to the particular tasks to avoid discrepancy.

Work towards perfecting the team-building techniques and establish autonomous connections between team members.

After the launch have a code review performed by an independent agency to make sure everything is on point.

Shrink the hired digital agency staff involved in your project if there is no immediate follow up, or extend the team further if there is a need to keep your business growing.

Relevance of Digital Agency Consulting

Our experience working on both ends of web development has given our project managers a clear understanding of how remote collaboration must be tuned in order to deliver the best possible output.

We believe in transparent and efficient workflow that takes into account all the variables of client’s business process, as well as the technical limitations and procedures established by our development team. These aspects must be clear and accepted by the management team during the consulting sessions that early on are the key initial actions defining future success.

Following these simple lists of actions might save you time and money while granting the genuine understanding of collaboration with a digital agency and help establish a long-time partnership.