Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Client retainers are a great way for agencies to create predictable revenue, but they can become expensive when your team doesn’t know how work is being consumed. This guide provides a practical method to manage retainer accounts, track hours, spot risks of overruns, protect margins, and support renewal conversations with real data.

Every agile team I've been part of has gone through the same cycle with metrics. Someone proposes tracking velocity. Someone else adds cycle time. A third person builds a dashboard with fifteen charts. Within two months, nobody looks at any of them. The problem is not a lack of data. It's a lack of clarity about what decisions the data should inform.

Every stakeholder report I've written that actually changed a decision had one thing in common: it was built for the person reading it, not the person writing it. That sounds obvious, but in practice, most professional services teams default to a single report template and blast it to everyone from the CEO to the client contact. The result? Leadership skims for the one number they care about. Clients get anxious about details that don't concern them.

The best time tracking software for small businesses automates timesheets, monitors employee productivity, tracks project hours, and simplifies payroll without the need for manual entry.

‍ Every unbilled hour is revenue you earned and gave away for free. Yet the moment managers tighten up time tracking, teams tense up — it starts to feel like surveillance, and people resent logging every minute. The challenge isn't choosing between accuracy and morale. It's getting both.

AI is a helpful tool but, without guardrails, its writing can fall flat. We joke about AI tells like em-dash overuse and “it’s not X, it’s Y,” but issues with over-reliance on AI writing go deeper. On Atlassian’s Brand team, these areas are top of mind. We want to move fast with AI but still put out content that is useful, fun to read, and trustworthy.

Communication is just not simply talking to people anymore; it involves doing things with people around you, physically or with a video call from a person on the other side of the earth. A variety of choices in communication tools make you sail smoothly throughout the day or turn any task into an uncomfortable juggling act. Slack and Zoom rank among popular choices that will get people connected and forward. Although both help communications flow, that’s pretty much where the commonality stops.

Kanban and Scrum are both agile frameworks used to manage work, but they solve different problems: Kanban is a continuous-flow system built around visual boards and work-in-progress limits, while Scrum is a structured, sprint-based framework with fixed roles, ceremonies, and time-boxed iterations, and the right choice depends on whether your team's work arrives unpredictably or can be planned in advance.

Project profitability is the profit a project generates after subtracting all costs required to deliver it: labor, contractors, expenses, and overhead. The core formula is project profit equals project revenue minus total project costs. This guide walks agencies through a repeatable method to calculate project margins, identify where costs accumulate, and track profitability in time to act on it, whether you use a spreadsheet, a finance system, or time tracking software.

For years, I ran quarterly planning sessions with the teams I worked with including founders, product managers, and team leads. These were smart people who genuinely wanted to get the next quarter right. Every time, the same thing happened — weeks of back and forth, too many opinions, and too many priorities competing for the top spot. By the time everyone agreed, the list had 10 or more goals that nobody fully owned.