We run a Velocity Workshop to close the gap between the people who estimate your project and the people who build it.

The project is behind schedule and over budget. Tensions are high, fingers are pointing, and the C-suite wants to know how this happened. “It was all in the brief!”

Maybe the brief is the problem.

Most digital marketing projects start with a written creative brief. Project teams and client stakeholders use it to agree on scope, timeline and budget. On paper, that agreement holds. Once work begins, people discover they read the same document and pictured different projects.

What is a Velocity Workshop?

A Velocity Workshop is Clear Digital’s kickoff session at the start of every engagement, before design or development begins. Your CMO, VP or director of marketing and other stakeholders work alongside our project manager, lead UX, lead designer, lead developers and content team. Together, the group produces a shared project roadmap with confirmed hours and estimates.

Why do B2B marketing projects go over budget?

A new marketing project starts with enthusiasm. A few weeks in, the fire drills begin. Teams misread a requirement, commit to an unrealistic goal, hit a technical snag or get conflicting feedback from two stakeholders. You pay for each fire drill in schedule and budget, and your team and your agency’s team both wear down.

Part of the answer is who writes the estimate. At most agencies, the people who win the business write the proposal: agency owners, business development teams and salespeople. They focus on the numbers, and they tolerate risk and ambiguity well.

The people who deliver the project want certainty and avoid risk. They are the designers, content strategists, project managers and developers. When the two groups see the project differently, the client pays for the gap in missed dates and change orders.

To keep a project on time and on budget, close the gap between estimation and execution before work starts. Get both groups, and your stakeholders, to agree on the same goals, expectations and constraints at kickoff.

What is a Velocity Workshop™?

Clear Digital built the Velocity Workshop to close that gap. We run one at the start of every project. Think of it as a live-action brief.

With a written brief, you can’t tell who read it, who understood it or how much of it anyone remembers. In a workshop, you hear the questions and settle them on the spot. Your stakeholders and our delivery team leave with one shared understanding of the approach and the requirements, and with an estimate the people doing the work have tested.

The workshop is part of how we run collaboration on every engagement.

How does a Velocity Workshop work?

We bring everyone involved in the project together.

• From your side: the CMO, the VP or director of marketing and any other stakeholder with a say in the project.
• From ours: the project manager, lead UX, lead designer, lead developers and the content team who will do the work.

Then we talk it through. We hammer out the details and map every project component, breaking the work into pieces we can sort and organize.

With the whole team together, people ask the questions they would skip over in a document. We also get to know each other, and projects run more smoothly when the people on both sides have met.

Once both teams agree on what we know and what we don’t, we build the roadmap. We break the project into its essential elements and arrange them into a roadmap from kickoff to launch. Then we adjust or confirm hours and estimates in the open with you, so the budget matches the plan. You avoid the uncomfortable change-order and timeline conversations halfway through the build.

What changes after a Velocity Workshop?

Teams who understand why a project exists make better calls about what goes into it. Your stakeholders and our team leave a Velocity Workshop with the same roadmap on day one, built by the people who estimated the work and the people who will deliver it. Projects move faster, and they are less likely to run over budget or miss launch. You see fewer fire drills.

Working out the details together also builds the relationship. People retain more of what they talk through, and they misread each other less once the project is underway.

See how the Velocity Workshop fits into Clear Digital’s approach, or talk to us about booking a Velocity Workshop for your next website or marketing project.