Keeping agencies in sync with integrated project management

For a multinational advertising group, every client deadline matters and every billable hour counts. Behind the glossy campaigns, though, the internal project and time management story was messy. Each agency had evolved its own spreadsheets, tools and workarounds; finance relied on after-the-fact reconciliation; and leadership lacked a reliable, portfolio-wide view of projects, utilisation and profitability.

The group had already committed to migrating finance onto SAP and standardising sales on Salesforce CPQ, but the project and time layer in the middle was the weak link. Without a single, scalable PPM and time solution that could integrate with both systems, the organisation would keep leaking time, money and insight.

Joining as programme manager, I was asked to lead the roll-out of Planview Clarizen across more than 100 agencies. The goal was simple to state but hard to execute: one cloud-based project and time management tool, integrated with SAP and Salesforce, that could support the management, delivery and billing of work across the entire group.

Working with the Head of Product and Head of Agency Technology, I mobilised a 60+ person product and engineering organisation spread across seven teams. Together, we defined a "fit for purpose" global template that respected common processes—briefing, delivery, sign-off, billing—while allowing controlled flexibility where agencies genuinely needed it. That template became the backbone for configuration, integrations and rollout.

Rolling out a new PPM tool to 100+ agencies isn't just a technology project; it's a behaviour-change programme. To keep momentum without overwhelming teams, I adopted a hybrid delivery approach—using Scrum and Agile practices within each squad, wrapped in a light but clear programme structure for planning, dependencies and reporting.

We created an advanced roadmap and capacity plans so leadership could see exactly how seven delivery teams were being used, what was in-flight, and what trade-offs were needed to hit key milestones. That transparency helped reduce competing priorities and kept the wider stakeholder group aligned.

Risk management moved from slide decks into Jira. I embedded a simple but disciplined risk and issue process there, making it part of the teams' everyday workflow rather than an afterthought. This gave us early warning on integration challenges, data quality issues, and agency readiness, and meant we could course-correct before problems hit go-live.

Alongside the tooling and processes, I invested in people. Acting as scrum master, project manager and portfolio lead at different points, I modelled Agile ways of working for product and engineering teams and personally mentored two emerging project managers—helping them build the confidence and skills to run their own workstreams. Over time, Agile best practices became part of how the organisation worked, not just something the programme asked for.

The result was a genuinely integrated solution: Clarizen at the centre, automatically feeding time and project data into SAP for billing and into Salesforce CPQ for commercial visibility. Agencies gained a single place to manage work; finance gained cleaner, more timely data; and leadership gained a reliable portfolio view across clients, brands and markets.