PM philosophy

Trellis is made and maintained by a creative and digital agency — an SME with over 20 years in business. Over that time we have worked with and served myriad clients in almost every industry there is, spanning private, public, and third-sector organisations. That variety of contexts and experiences has resulted in the evolution of a robust process for project and resource management — effective regardless of your working methodology.

Ultimately it's a system most effective for handling the complexities and often ambiguities of managing multiple project teams with different combinations of people at different experience levels through myriad overlapping projects, ensuring you see them through to completion on time and budget.

What follows is our best explanation of how the system works.

1. You conceive a project proposal

You create high-level timelines and costings.

This helps you quickly create the foundation of decent project management — how long, how much? One source of truth for the project team and client stakeholders alike.

2. You seek client confirmation for this proposal

You validate the proposal for approval and, if you want, apply additional terms and conditions of delivery.

Most agencies have a range of projects at different budget levels, and without elements of automation commercial reality often means that the bigger-budget projects are the ones that get the most due diligence in terms of the paperwork and agreements around delivering the work. Trellis gives you a sign-off process that means even your smaller-budget projects are covered by your org's generic Ts and Cs with a paper trail to support it. This offers you the opportunity to protect yourself from the worst behaviours that, unfortunately, most agencies will encounter on the client side at some point.

3. You allocate the work to colleagues in Planning

You decide who will perform the work against your agreed budget in Planning.

This is helpful because in most instances the quote you gave will be based on generic rate cards for different roles and experience — but once you've actually won the project, the person you end up delegating the task to might not be the same role and rate as you envisaged at proposal stage. This step treats the money agreed as a pot to be re-allocated — what you need to know as a planner is: does your allocation based on the personnel available add up to the spend you envisaged?

4. You resource your allocation

You decide when the work will happen in Resourcing.

Once you've allocated the project work to the best people to do the work and made sure the money is right, now it's time to get more granular and actually work out when that effort should be placed. If you're part of a busy organisation, then the team members you've selected will already be deployed on multiple projects — some already underway, others in the planning, others will be taking annual leave during the project duration. Without being able to plan around the existing calendar of commitments, the planning is completely redundant.

The beauty of the Trellis system is that you still have flexibility to juggle effort around the calendar and between the team members until the plan becomes both feasible and commercially viable.

5. You brief your team on the work that needs to be done

You break down the work into tasks.

Whilst the features in Trellis aren't designed to replace the hugely valuable element of direct communication between team members, they do aim to support the documentation and structure of every offline process. How granular your organisation wants to be in the way you document the tasks delegated across the team is entirely up to you. Trellis supports different types of approach: the highest level is a deliverable — if you want, you can stop here, detailing only the high-level goals of each deliverable; if you want to be more granular, you can nest tasks and sub-tasks under each deliverable. Where this impacts the business comes down to reporting — timelogs can be made against deliverables, tasks, and sub-tasks. If you want to track how efficient you are, then you need to give it its own task. This can become a helpful analytical commercial tool, enabling your team to see across projects the types of work that typically take you longer or shorter amounts of time than quoted or predicted. Insight like this can help you improve either your internal training focus or your approach to more accurate quotation.

It's also worth considering the psychology and philosophical aspects of leadership and briefing. There is much to be read about the different outcomes yielded by the systems you implement for your team. A highly rigid and tightly overseen granular approach to briefing and monitoring could be perfect for a high-risk process or procedure, but might impact creativity. A looser high-level approach might enable more visionary thinking and empower people to grow as decision makers, but suffer if your team is too junior to make quality decisions.

6. You monitor delivery

You review task completion and adjust your planning accordingly.

Once your project has begun in earnest with all the project management tasks actioned, Trellis presents you with a chart that updates in real time, where planned resources are plotted against the project profitability. This is shown against bar charts that document worked time as your team log their timesheets against tasks. Alongside these valuable visualisations you can evaluate the completion status of tasks, monitoring and tweaking your resourcing level until the final deliverable is executed.