Every project has a project manager, no matter what.

Every project needs a single owner who is responsible for driving things forward and maintaining the schedule. This could be a full-time PM. It could be the agency owner who owns the client relationship. There are times when it's even appropriate for a developer on the project to spend one hour each week circling the wagons. But the point is that this is an official position, and it's one person. Everyone knows who it is.

They're the one you call when there's a question about the schedule. They own client communication. They check that the schedule is right every week. They monitor whether you're actually on track with scheduled hours, and make updates on the fly if not.

The tools we give them

First, the scheduling tool. Here they can see who is currently assigned and how actual timesheet entries line up against the assignments. Discrepancies are highlighted. Everything is a link to the source of truth, so you can jump around quickly.

If someone will be out, you can quickly override their scheduled assignment for any given week.

And you can set any given week as the "default week" for all future assigned weeks. This makes it easy to capture adjustments to the engagement — scaling up, scaling down, or shifting the team around.

On the engagement management page, we show a more global view of all assignments and workers for the whole engagement. Are you ahead or behind? By how much? How do you want to reconcile this?

In Tidy, this is an absolutely critical role. It doesn't just "get done." It has an owner who gets reminders about it.