This client project management template helps you establish your team’s reputation for quality work and build lasting relationships with your clients. Here’s how:

• Lay out a clear project plan for each client, and share it with them to track updates in real time.
• Get a bird’s-eye view of your all in-progress and high-priority work across all projects.
• Track time for each task or for a whole project, and identify approval bottlenecks.

What is client project management?

Client project management is the process professional services firms and agencies use to make sure the work they deliver meets their client’s needs and requirements and is on time and within budget. Managing client projects happens in five phases: scoping, kick-off, preparing deliverables, feedback and approvals, and handoff.

Who is this client project management template for?

This client project management template is designed for project managers, client success managers, account managers, or those overseeing projects at an agency or firm providing creative or professional services.

What’s the best way to manage client projects?

1. Define project scope and layout deliverables clearly

Getting on the same page with your client about expectations for the project early on sets you up for success down the line. Create a list to house all your deliverables for the client account based on your scope of work. Set a Priority, Start date, and Due date for each item. You can also leverage custom attributes to propose time or budget estimates.

2. Bridge the gap between your client and your team

Transparently sharing where work stands is key to building trust with your clients. Invite your client’s team as guests to the list so they can track progress in real time, without ever having to send you an email or request additional status review meetings.

Collaborate with clients and capture all their feedback directly in the in-task chat so you don’t miss any key input in email threads or DMs. Put your approval process on autopilot and automatically assign your client as a Reviewer on a task once it’s tagged as ‘Ready for approval’.

3. Keep your team focused on the most important work

When you’re managing projects across multiple clients, managing your team’s workload and assigning the right people to the right account is critical to delivering quality work on time. Pull work across all your clients in one place using Smart lists. You can filter and section these internal reports by client, priority, status, assignee, and any custom attribute you need.

Account for non-client facing work including internal standup meetings or miscellaneous admin with private tasks that are only accessible to your agency team or specific account managers.

4. Track billable hours and identify bottlenecks

Managing billable hours and having a clear picture of where your team is spending their time is not only critical for your profitability, but also helps you provide more accurate estimates to your clients. Track the time your team spent on a specific task, or collectively on an entire project. Review progress bar to see far along a task is and remove the roadblocks that are holding the team back by checking the ‘Blocked by’ attribute.

5. Keep your client in the loop and communicate updates regularly

Whether your client wants a monthly progress report sent to them, wants to walk through a project board together during status meetings, or requests an ad-hoc report for the work you’re prioritizing this week, you can leverage smart lists to create a custom overview of specific tasks that your client and their team can browse through. Plus, these reports will keep updating automatically as work changes based on the custom filters that you set up.

What are the key milestones in managing a client project?

While each account’s scope of work and deliverables a client requests vary significantly, there are 5 key stages that make up a client project’s lifecycle:

1. Initiation: To start, you align on the scope of the project with the client and define specifications and requirements.

2. Planning: Break down your scope of work into a project plan with tasks assigned to a clear owner and due date.

3. Implementation: Kick off the project with the team and start preparing client deliverables.

4. Oversight: Provide direction and feedback, reprioritize tasks as needed, and share work with the client for approval.

5. Closure: Hand-off the final deliverables, debrief on how the project went, and submit invoices.