Does this sound familiar?
Your team is juggling multiple client projects, deadlines are tight, and profits are in the red despite everyone being “busy.” Some team members are overloaded, others are underutilized. Project timelines slip when key people are unexpectedly unavailable—and it’s just Monday.
These aren’t just operational headaches. They’re symptoms of a deeper challenge agencies of all sizes face: the lack of effective resource management.
In this tactical guide, we explore how successful agencies are tackling these challenges head-on. Through real-world examples and expert insights, you’ll learn actionable approaches to improving team performance, retaining clients, and achieving sustainable growth—whether managing a 15-person or 500+-person team.
Does your agency have a resource management problem? Here are five tell-tale signs
Resource management challenges rarely appear overnight. They often sneak up on you, masked by quick fixes and workarounds, until they begin seriously impacting your agency’s performance and profitability.
Here are the most common signs that your resource management setup needs attention:
1. Poor visibility into real capacity
You’re struggling to accurately forecast resource needs or confidently take on new projects because you can’t see your team’s true capacity.
Despite your best efforts, your projects keep running over schedule or budget. Your team is juggling too many commitments simultaneously while trying to maintain quality and meet due dates. Without proper capacity planning, you’re missing milestones and watching project timelines slip.
2. Unsustainable utilization rates
You thought you found the right utilization rate for your agency, only to realize you forgot to account for non-billable work, meetings, internal reviews, and necessary breaks between tasks.
100% billable utilization all the time is just not happening. As a result, you’re constantly dealing with both overworked and underutilized team members, which inevitably leads to burnout and lost agency profits.
➡️ Learn how to tailor utilization to align with your agency’s needs. Watch We need to talk about utilization.
3. Leaving estimation to chance
You don’t have a process in place to estimate the real timelines and costs of projects. You take on work, hoping that projects will pan out well—and when they don’t so your team has to pull all-nighters. Projects are rushed and go over budget. Also, you never collected relevant data about past projects, so you don’t have any data to fall back onto.
While skipping on estimates might have worked when your agency was smaller, it’s becoming a major blocker as you grow.
Consistently getting projects done just in the nick of time while burning your team out is unsustainable. In the moment, it feels very cool to have done it and can be great for team building. But if that’s the bar you’re aiming for, rather than [having] well-estimated projects, it can become very difficult to sustain that level of activity over time. Especially as you scale. The more you estimate and do it by the book you’ve made, the more predictable everything becomes—and hopefully, everyone’s lives become a little bit easier.
4. Reactive rather than proactive planning
You find yourself constantly shuffling resources to handle "urgent" requests. Without a structured prioritization framework, your teams are context-switching between projects, reducing overall productivity.
This constant firefighting makes it nearly impossible to focus on long-term strategic planning. Instead of aligning resources with business goals and future growth, you’re stuck solving immediate capacity issues.
5. Multiple sources of truth
Your team’s information is spread across different project management tools or spreadsheets to track resourcing information. This fragmented approach makes it hard to track time accurately, and you end up dealing with double bookings. You waste valuable time just trying to figure out who’s available and when.
If you’ve experienced some or all of these tell-tale signs and are worried about your agency, the diagnosis is you likely have a severe resourcing problem.
The cure is to improve your resource management processes—and one of the first steps you can consider is adopting dedicated resource planning software like Float. Instead of us giving you a long list of pros and benefits, you can just watch this quick demo (it’s less than 5 minutes) to learn how a dedicated solution can help you build winning teams that deliver projects on budget and time, by matching the right people to the right work.
Common resource management challenges you (and all the other agencies you know) are facing
Resource management challenges can feel overwhelming whether you’re a boutique studio like STORM+SHELTER managing complex production schedules or a global agency like Scholz & Friends coordinating 200+ team members across multiple locations.
Our conversations with agencies of all sizes reveal these common pain points that might sound familiar:
1. Doing the client priority shuffle
Client needs can shift dramatically mid-project, forcing agencies to rapidly reorganize their resources and adjust delivery timelines.
“You’re not working on a single project at one given time,’ notes Emily Feliciano, Global Operations Manager at Atlassian, who previously led resource management at top agencies. “You have a large amount of commitments that you are doing simultaneously.” When multiple clients make simultaneous changes or urgent requests, it creates a domino effect that impacts other projects and team workloads.
2. Fighting the department tug-of-war
Coordinating resources across departments with different goals and priorities can feel like an endless negotiation.
For resource managers and operations leaders, this leads to constant pressure to keep everyone happy while maintaining productivity. You’re caught between creative teams that need focused time, account managers pushing to meet client deadlines, and department heads protecting their resources.
3. Solving the right person, right project puzzle
Finding the perfect resource for an initiative isn’t just about availability: it’s about matching skills, experience, and career goals with project needs.
For people planners, this means constantly evaluating not just who’s free but who’s best suited for each piece of work.
I have people in my team who really excel in static visual design, others who really excel in video. One is going to be quicker at the other and slower at the other. This human element of resource management extends beyond just skills to understanding each person’s unique strengths and work patterns.
4. Having different definitions of the same concept
As teams grow, maintaining consistent resource management practices becomes increasingly complex.
It might sound simple, but just the nomenclature of titles—and what those titles mean—can be a major challenge in agency work. You have teams estimating the work, teams executing it, and the resourcing team in the middle. If everyone uses different language or terms for the same things (or the same language for different things), it becomes one of the hardest obstacles to scale.
Even basic concepts like role titles, project phases, and capacity measurements can be interpreted differently across departments, leading to confusion and misalignment. When teams use different terminology when discussing resourcing, it becomes nearly impossible to get a clear picture of availability and workload.
5. Doing the daily resource reshuffle
Just when you think you’ve got your resource schedule perfectly balanced, everything changes. A team member calls in sick, a client emergency demands immediate attention, or a project hits an unexpected snag.
For resource planners, it can feel like trying to solve a puzzle while someone’s constantly changing the pieces.
6. Bridging the great divide between expectations and actuals
Agency leaders know this sinking feeling when the estimated hours for a project look nothing like the actual time spent.
This disconnect between planned and tracked time isn’t just a reporting headache—it impacts future project estimates, team capacity planning, and, ultimately, profitability.
This is what digital agency Apps with love, was facing before using a dedicated resource management solution. With time tracking spread across several spreadsheets, Martin Mattli, the Head of Operations and Quality Management, struggled to gather reliable data about how long tasks actually took. Six months after switching to Float from timesheets, he discovered that he was able to track over 10,000 hours of his team’s time that were previously lost due to incorrect spreadsheet entries.
🌶️Hot take: spreadsheets are not bad for a start, but they can’t grow with you
Glenn Rogers, our CEO here at Float, believes small teams can start resourcing in a spreadsheet, but they need to switch out once they hit the 30-person mark.
Based on his experience [in digital agencies Razorfish and Made For Human] once your team scales, keeping tabs on everyone’s capacity becomes complex, and you will struggle to understand who is doing what and when across siloed spreadsheets. Manual entry increases the chance of error, making your data unreliable.
Switching to resource management software lets you centralize resourcing information like capacity, allocations, and time logs in one place. Not only that, schedules and capacity are updated in real time, so you can always see changes as they happen and account for them.
What’s in it for agencies that figure out resource management?
Resource management challenges are significant, but agencies that get them right will see transformative effects across their operations. Instead of discussing theoretical benefits, let’s look at what real teams have actually achieved with better resource management.
Boost efficiency and hit your targets
Meeting deadlines consistently isn’t just about working harder—it’s about having clear visibility into your team’s capacity and making informed allocation decisions. When you can see exactly who’s available and match them to the right projects, your team’s efficiency improves dramatically.
FlightStory Studio experienced this transformation firsthand, becoming 50% more efficient through better resource management.
Float has made us 50% more efficient in terms of how we’re budget tracking and streamlining our workflow. We took on a project at the start of this year, and it was the first time we’d done a project like that. We used the reports from that project to baseline future ones. We’ve done five more of those projects this year, and every single one came in right on budget, exactly where we planned it.
Reclaim hours spent on planning
Resource planning shouldn’t eat up hours of your week. When you’re managing a large creative team, time spent shuffling resources around is time taken away from strategic work that could grow your business.
SocialChain, a global social media agency, found a way to reclaim four hours previously wasted due to double handling every week. That’s over 200 hours per year redirected to meaningful work—time better spent on client relationships, team development, and business growth.
Scale your team without losing profitability
With the right resource management approach, you can identify skill gaps and hire the right team members at the right time. This helps your agency have enough capacity to deliver quality work and keeping everyone on the team properly utilized.
Accounts & Legal demonstrated this approach by sustainably doubling their team size. Their secret? Clear visibility into capacity and resource needs, which allowed them to make strategic hiring decisions, maintain efficient operations, and meet client expectations as they scaled.
When we were planning [in Float] we could see that there were more and more clients, things were getting tighter and tighter. That expresses the need to recruit.
Boost team satisfaction
Happy teams do better work. When your people have clear visibility into their workload and aren’t constantly context-switching between projects, they’re more likely to stay engaged and satisfied.
STORM+SHELTER’s production team discovered that better resource management didn’t just improve their efficiency—it transformed their work environment. By giving their team better visibility into capacity and workload, they created a more balanced and sustainable way of working that was a win win for everyone at the agency, and their customers too.
The team has got a clearer understanding of what’s going on, where, and when. Float makes me feel a lot more confident in not being as involved in the projects as my role evolves. I feel more reassured that what needs to happen is clear enough for people instead of thinking they’d be digging through lots of different messages to try and figure out what they need to do on any given day.
What an optimal resource management process looks like
Whether you’re starting from scratch or improving an existing system, building an effective resource management process requires careful planning and implementation. Here’s a 5-step guide to help you develop a method that works for your agency:
1. Establish your resource management needs
What does successful resource management look like for your agency?
Start by defining your specific goals and pain points with questions like:
- Are you struggling with missed deadlines?
- Is your team constantly overworked?
- Do you lack visibility into project profitability?
Write these down and set measurable objectives—for instance, improving on-time delivery from 60% to 85% or reducing overtime hours by 25%.
Next, schedule individual meetings with department heads to understand their unique needs and challenges. Document how different teams currently manage their resources. This will help you identify what’s working and what isn’t while ensuring everyone’s voice is heard.
2. Create your single source of truth
For agencies, having multiple systems tracking resources leads to confusion, double booking, and inefficient allocation. The solution is to centralize all resource information in one dedicated tool.
A note from the editor
We recommend dedicated resource management software because all-in-one tools and project management software rarely offer key data like capacity, availability, and cost rates. If they do, it might be hard to find this information, leaving you to dig for it.
A tool like Float that’s built for resourcing has been refined over a decade to give you the insights you need to make better decisions about how your team spends their time at work.
Start by centralizing your team’s information in a tool like Float, including their skills, work schedules, time off policies, and calendar events. You can customize each person’s working hours, whether they’re full-time or freelancers, and set up regional holidays to ensure you’re working with accurate availability data.
Scholz & Friends uses Float’s tagging system to quickly locate specific talent across their 200+ creative team: “You can click to find a motion designer or a copywriter, and you immediately have a list of everyone across all offices,“ explains Maike Jahnens, Head of Financial Operations and Capacity Management.
You can make this information even more helpful by adding each team member’s working hours, availability, and billable rates. With regional holidays and time-off policies included, you’ll have a complete picture of your resources that everyone can trust and reference.
3. Map your team’s actual capacity
Does your team’s expected capacity match reality?
We believe agencies can only see their team’s true capacity when they account for everything that takes their time, like stakeholder meetings, internal reviews, and time off.
The best resource managers we see operating in Float today are looking at real capacity. It’s not a 40-hour work week anymore. You have vacations, family leave, and different aspects of your day that are taken up in non-billable work. They take into account all those factors and then start to look at the time that is really available for billable projects. These resource managers are typically thriving because their team is allocated work in a way that sets them up for success so they can deliver exceptional service to clients.
Consider reviewing what your team has spent time on over the past few weeks to get a better idea of their capacity. Hopefully, you’ve been tracking this information in your resourcing tool or spreadsheets.
You might notice that a team lead at your creative agency spends 10% of their time in 1:1 meetings. With that in mind, you’re closer to knowing how much time they have to tackle tasks. You can then allocate work that can fit into their available time and won’t overwhelm them.
Alternatively, if you use Float, you can look at the date range insights on the Schedule and in the Report tab and see how much capacity a team member has left.
The key to successful resource allocation lies in matching the right talent to the right projects, not just assigning tasks to available resources. Instrument, a design and technology company calls the process ’casting’, much like a movie director would cast their film with all the right actors:
The two elements I believe are super important in casting are compatibility and chemistry. Compatibility means you have the right skill sets and your passions align. Chemistry means you can work really well with the team. We don’t necessarily look for who’s available. Because when you do that, you’ll probably not cast the right person. You start thinking about it through the lens of resourcing and utilization versus the ultimate trust and success of the project.
➡️ Learn tactics for building future proof agenices and teams from Glenn and Laurel. Watch Now is the time to rethink how we work.
With a dedicated resource management tool like Float, you can quickly filter your team by skills, departments, or availability to find the perfect match for each project. You might find it helpful to start with tentative bookings for upcoming projects and then firm up allocations as timelines solidify.
But beyond using a tool like Float, you also need to know your team members well to assign them to the right projects. Use the questions below as a guide:
- What are their strongest skills?
- What skills are they interested in developing?
- Who do they work best with?
- Whose weaknesses do they complement with their strengths?
5. Track and review for continuous improvement
The final piece of successful resource management for your agency is establishing a feedback loop between your plans and reality.
Without tracking how projects actually unfold, you’re likely to repeat estimation mistakes and struggle to improve resource allocation over time. Regular monitoring helps you spot patterns, refine your planning process, and make better resourcing decisions.
Take FlightStory Studio: by analyzing completed projects in Float’s reports, they created a data-driven foundation for future planning. They tracked new project budgets and actual time spent. They began matching their estimates more closely, leading to more predictable resourcing.
We took on a project at the start of this year, and it was the first time we’d done one like that. We used the Float reports from that project to baseline future ones. We’ve done five more of those projects this year, and every single one came in right on budget, exactly where we planned it.
In Float, you can track project progress, compare estimated versus actual hours, see the number of billable hours, and analyze real-time budget spend. Consider setting up monthly review sessions to examine this data—you’ll likely discover trends that help you estimate more accurately and allocate resources more effectively over time.
Choose the right agency resource management software and (almost) everything else will fall into place
Implementing effective resource management doesn’t happen overnight. Still, the impact on your agency’s efficiency and profitability makes it worthwhile.
Thousands of agencies have found that using Float helps them turn good intentions into consistent practices. We’ve helped teams of all sizes streamline their resource management—from tracking capacity and managing schedules to monitoring project performance.
The #1 choice for agency resource management software
Ranked the no. 1 resource management software by G2, Float gives you the real-time insights to make smarter resourcing decisions.
We couldn’t have written this without:
FAQs
Some FAQs about agency resource management
Agency resource management is the process of planning, scheduling, and optimizing how your agency’s team members are allocated across client projects to ensure efficient delivery and profitability.
In the agency context, resources primarily refer to the people delivering client work— designers, developers, writers, strategists, and project managers. Each team member brings unique skills, experience levels, and working capacities that need to be carefully managed.
The most successful agencies maintain a single source of truth for resource planning, set realistic utilization targets that account for non-billable work, and regularly track actual time against estimates. They also use dedicated resource management software to maintain visibility across their operations.
