How to Leverage Your Relationship with Your Agency Project Manager for Better Project Results

You’ve hired an agency, or you’re thinking about hiring one. You review the agency statement of work and notice a significant chunk of your budget under the project management line item. You are probably starting to question, “Why do I need to pay so much for a project manager? Isn’t that just the person who schedules the meetings, takes notes, and sends out those reports I don’t always read?”

This article will explain why your agency’s PM is one of the most valuable resources on your account—and how to make the most of your relationship. I promise, your project will be better because of it.

Before you can work well with your PM, it helps to know the full scope of their role. While this can vary from agency to agency, a good PM generally plays a much larger role than you see on your check-in calls. They are:

• Your advocate inside the agency. They’re the person making sure your project doesn’t get deprioritized when things get busy internally. They work to secure the right resources to ensure your project’s success. They’re also internally mitigating risks and ensuring the success of your project. With so many plates spinning, it’s easy for agency leaders to assume everything is on track—so having someone who is there to look out for your project in real time is critical.
• The traffic controller. They’re sequencing work, managing deadlines, and coordinating between designers, writers, developers, and strategists—all at once. This is why they might be a bit of a stickler when giving you deadlines for feedback and approvals: it’s because they’re lining up the resources to take the next steps after you’ve had a chance to weigh in, and if you blow the schedule, it’s difficult (or impossible) to stick to the timeline. Agencies bleed profit when they have people sitting and waiting, so it is important to the agency’s business model that utilization remains high. Otherwise, agencies risk needing to reduce team sizes. The PM helps to ensure that everyone’s plate remains consistently full. This sometimes means being creative with scheduling and balancing projects between the best team members for the job!
• The early warning system. A great PM spots problems (budget overruns, timeline risks, scope creep) before they become your problem. They’re also coming up with a menu of possible solutions so that the trains never fully derail, and your project can keep moving forward with minimal disruption.

The first step in having a great relationship with your PM may be to clarify with the agency (or, even better, with the PM) what their role entails and how they will support your project. You may also want to learn about their experience managing similar projects.

Your PM should also make an effort to get to know you and how you like to work. If they don’t, feel free to tell them. This will ensure that they understand what success looks like for both the project and your working relationship.

The fastest way to slow down an agency is to give them five different stakeholders with five different opinions and no clear decision-maker. Your PM needs to know who to go to when a question needs an answer, a decision needs to be made, or something needs to be approved.

Help set yourselves—and your project—up for success:

1. Designate a single point of contact on your team — ideally someone with decision-making authority, or at least quick access to the final decision-maker.
2. Let your PM know upfront who that person is and what their availability looks like.
3. If decisions require sign-off from multiple people on your end, share that process so the PM can build it into the timeline and ensure there is enough time for your approval workflow without disrupting the timeline.

While it might take you a little more time to consolidate internal feedback, this investment of your time will help your PM run your project more efficiently. It can be critical when it comes to limiting rounds of revision, staying within your budget, and launching on time.

A skilled PM can work around almost anything. Things like:

• Delayed internal approvals
• A shifting launch date
• Changing priorities
• Stakeholders clashing
• Budgets shrinking
• Layoffs and employee turnover

But first, we need to know about it. The thing that makes it harder to navigate is finding out about the issue too late. The sooner you can let your PM know there might be an issue, the more options we can give you for how to proceed.

A good agency PM has likely seen whatever you’re encountering before (and an experienced one likely many times over), so if there are things you can share with your PM, they might have some guidance on how to best move things forward without derailing your project.

If the project does derail? They can often help ensure things wrap up neatly so that they can resume most efficiently at the right time!

To get the most out of the relationship, think of your PM as a partner, not a vendor. If something is changing on your side, such as your priorities, timeline, budget, or internal stakeholders, you want to let your PM know. A quick heads-up email or a sidebar conversation buys them the time to adjust before it becomes a fire.

Weekly check-ins can easily become a check-the-box activity and eat budget without adding much value. Preparing for these meetings can also shift focus for the project team away from completing critical work. Status meetings where we read out what’s done and what is coming up next don’t add much value to the project; meetings where you are working together, reviewing work in progress, or making decisions are much more valuable.

You don’t have to settle for sitting through large, boring meetings that don’t add value. You can work with your PM to determine the most effective cadence for check-ins and what should happen in those meetings. While you don’t want to go too long without checking in and making sure you understand the work being done, it might not be necessary to meet with your PM or the project team every single week.

Depending on the project, consider status meetings at specific milestones or when the project team is seeking early feedback to ensure they’re on the right track.

You can also ask for weekly written status updates that might include progress on the work, plans for upcoming work, or tracking how the budget is pacing. There are ways for us to keep you in the loop without needing a full meeting (especially when sharing information that doesn’t need a discussion in the moment).

For larger projects, I always recommend a quarterly business review. This meeting helps both the agency team and your team zoom out and notice trends in work pacing and budget utilization. It’s also a good place to proactively bring up any issues to ensure small problems don’t become much larger because no one has a place to intervene. These meetings are also a great way to deepen the agency-client relationship.

The bottom line: Your PM should work with you at the beginning of the project to map out a communications cadence that feels like the right way to keep you informed over the course of the project. This plan can (and should) evolve if the project evolves. And if you have a question or a concern? You should have a direct line to your PM to voice that.

Scope creep is the killer of agency projects. Your PM’s job is to keep to the scope and budget agreed at the beginning of the project, or to work with you to make any necessary changes.

We know that things change, ideas come up, and priorities shift. This is why we need to be clear with you about what happens if we deviate from the initial scope. How will this impact the timeline, the budget, and the resources we’ve assigned to the project?

One thing I have seen many times over is misalignment over what is a small change and what is significant. This is where some education comes in handy. For someone who isn’t intimately familiar with the development process or the effort that goes into a “small change,” it’s easy to look at something like moving a button or adding a step to a process as minor.
But often, with more complex websites or custom software projects, this isn’t the case. And even if the change is smaller, it still takes time to stop progress, make the change, have the new work tested, and finally approved and deployed to either a staging environment or production.

Remember that your PM is here to help guide you through any changes and advise on the estimated impact of a scope change. There may be times when adjusting the scope really is the best thing for the project, and other times when it’s just a time-and-money-suck. So, have a conversation about your needs and the pros and cons of a scope change at the point in the project when it comes up.

A savvy PM may also recommend waiting until the end of the project or a future phase to make the change. A little flexibility and patience may be the thing that saves you both time and money while giving you what you need.

PMs are constantly calibrating: how much detail to include in updates, how often to check in, how much to escalate versus handle quietly. The only way they can calibrate correctly for you is if you tell them what’s working.

So if something isn’t working for you, don’t wait for a formal retrospective to share feedback. If the update emails are too long, say so. If you want more visibility into a particular workstream, ask for it. And if something is genuinely going well, say that, too — it’s useful information, and it goes a long way.

The more feedback you can give your PM, the easier it will be for them to keep you and your team happy. Agency PMs are usually well versed in working with people with different communication styles and needs, but we aren’t mind readers! The less your PM has to guess, the better off your project will be.

There may also be times when your PM has to have conversations with you about how your team is working with the project team or providing feedback. Be open to these conversations and hear what they are saying. If you’re not feeling clear about what is needed, your PM should be able to give you specific examples.

One area where I see a lot of issues arise in my own work as an agency PM is around design feedback. Asking for “bolder design”, “more color”—or even worse, the dreaded “make it ‘pop’”—doesn’t help the designer understand your vision. I will often coach my clients to come with specific examples of “bolder designs” or “more color,” so that the designer can see what that subjective direction looks like to them.

A great agency PM makes your project run better, your team looks good, and your investment go further. But they can only do that if you’re a real partner to them—not just a name in their inbox.

Show up. Communicate early. Make decisions. Trust the process they’ve built. Do those things, and you’ll get far more out of your agency than most clients ever do.