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.

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.

Your in-office employees are visible. You can see when they arrive, when they step away, and how long they stay. Your remote employees are not. Yet you are expected to evaluate both groups with the same level of accuracy and fairness. For most managers running hybrid teams, this is not a hypothetical concern.

We believe this is a once-in-a-career moment for the HR craft. If we get this right, HR practitioners will spend less time on administrative coordination and more time on the work that drew most of us to this field: landing the right person in the right role, helping a manager lead a team through a crisis, coaching someone who is struggling into confidence and performance, resolving a conflict before trust breaks, designing an org structure that unlocks something a leader thought was impossible.

What separates a well-used intranet from one that collects digital dust? The organizations honored with the 2026 Simpplr Employee Experience Excellence Awards have cracked the code. Their platforms are places employees actively participate in, return to daily, and rely on to get things done.

If you have to manage all your tasks in three sticky notes, on an app on your phone, and from a conversation that took place in the hallway, then you definitely need help. People tend to get their hands on task management software when their workload is larger than anything that can be handled by a regular notebook or a reminder app on their phone.