The overused and somewhat cliché phrase “doing more with less” has never been truer. Clients are demanding quality output in a lot less time and at a much lower cost than ever before. As an in-house agency, this means balancing who you say “yes” to and who you avoid in the lunchroom. With proper preparation, prioritization and planning, your in-house agency can operate like a well-oiled machine—enabling individual performance and team success.

Prepare. It all starts with tracking time against jobs. One of the struggles in-house agencies face is justifying their value. Having raw, hard data on project-specific details prepares you for conversations with executive management. Not tracking your time? You’re not alone. IHAF’s survey data indicates that just under half of in-house agencies do. Though a significant percentage, it’s not a best practice. Start small—even basic time tracking helps. Remember, you can’t measure what you don’t track.

Prioritize. Whether determining what projects to tackle, how to order your to-do list, or when to take a lunch break, prioritization is a key part of everyday work life—especially for in-house agencies. Figuring out how to begin can be overwhelming, but necessary. Start by ensuring your team has the right tools in place to enable visibility to everything in the queue. From there, develop a way to objectively evaluate new deliverables against those in play. And ensure you have a process in place to deal with the inevitable fire drills.

Plan. Sitting down and scheduling project work can be like a sick game of Jenga. It all looks good and moves in the right direction, until splat—the entire schedule comes crumbling down and you’re left with resources that overbooked, underutilized or simply burnt out. Allocating work and resources effectively means monitoring the utilization of your team—hours per week, per project, per function/department, etc.

Want to learn more about how the three Ps can enable the success of your in-house team? Join Deltek and IHAF for our August 27th webinar where we’ll dive deeper into preparation, prioritization and planning. Register today.