Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

As AI accelerates work, leaders need to be more deliberate about what technology takes off people’s minds and where human attention can create the most value. AI promises to help organisations move faster. But at two Asana executive dinners held in Sydney and Melbourne in August, a different leadership question emerged: what should we choose not to accelerate? The challenge is not finding more hours in the day, but creating better conditions for the hours people already spend.

Think about everything a smartphone quietly replaced. The camera you used to pack for trips. The alarm clock on your bedside table. The paper map folded somewhere in the car. A music player, a calculator, a GPS unit, and a drawer full of chargers with no obvious owner. None of those things became useless. We just stopped needing each one separately when one device could handle most of the same jobs.

Nobody puts “coordination” on a job title, and yet almost everyone ends up doing it. Work coordination is the virtuous orchestration of internal and external processes – the constant, low-level hum of making sure the right task reaches the right person at the right time, that a decision made in one channel doesn’t get lost before it reaches the people who need to act on it, that a client-facing deadline and an internal review cycle actually meet in the middle instead of colliding.

Managing a remote team is easy when everyone is sitting in the same office. You can walk around, check in with people, and get a general sense of how work is moving. But remote work is different. Someone can be online all day without getting much meaningful work done. At the same time, someone else might spend hours in meetings, research, design software, or other work that doesn't necessarily produce a lot of keyboard or mouse activity.

On 11 September 2026, the first substantive deadline under the Cyber Resilience Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/2847, "the CRA") will come into effect. This Regulation entered into force on 10 December 2024, but it applies in stages, and this week’s date is the second of three stages. As from 11 September, manufacturers of products with digital elements placed on the EU market become subject to the reporting obligations set out in Article 14.

One remote worker might spend 3 productive hours working non-stop without ever touching their keyboard, while another might trigger hundreds of thousands of mouse movements with no meaningful output; that is the problem with monitoring remote work through surveillance: activity and productivity are not always synonymous.

I've seen this advice recycled for years, and it rarely fixes the real continuity problem. If you search how to retain agency clients, you get the same playlist: be proactive, run a quarterly business review, send a note, report ROI. Useful. Incomplete. The longest-held accounts I worked on shared one trait: clients rarely had to re-explain the brief, rarely felt the story reset when people changed, and rarely got surprised by the commercial story late in the year.

Most search results for PSA integration still assume you run an MSP service desk next to remote monitoring. That is useful if that is your business. It is less relevant if you are trying to keep agency retainers, consultancy fixed fees, and multi-role rate cards aligned with finance. What protects margin is clear ownership, not just adding another Zap. Two systems both believing they own the client, the rate, or the invoice status is the real risk.

What I keep seeing across services teams is adjacent tracking without a true client contribution view. You already watch utilisation, project budgets, or billable mix, yet a loud account can still look healthy while it taxes the firm. This guide shows how to measure client profitability, triage the book, and act while delivery is live.

Here’s a stat that’s been rattling around in my head. In our 2026 AI SDLC study, 94% of engineering leaders told us they’re using AI, but only 6% have the systems to actually scale it across their whole software lifecycle. Almost everyone is playing with agents, yet almost no one can let agents run at scale without things breaking.