2025 Guide to a Seamless Project Intake Process for Creative Teams

How do clients tell you what they need? Do they send a brief, write an email, or send a DM on LinkedIn or WhatsApp? How do they establish contact with you for the first few projects? 

Yes, you have a capable team that gets the job done, but you also have a problem. 

Your team members are becoming slow, unproductive, and, even worse, burnt out. That's because there are no structured ways to take on new projects. 

In Kiran Shahid, a content strategist’s experience, “as work piled on, so did the buried docs, scattered feedback, and five different message chains fighting for attention.” 

The culprit? Multiple project communication channels that confuse your team. 

And you're not alone; 72% of marketing and creative teams say they waste five or more hours a week switching between tools to complete tasks. 

You need an effective project intake process to help your team handle client requests better. In this guide, I'll explain what a proper project intake process looks like, signs that your process is taking a toll on your team, and how to develop a good process. 

What is a Proper Project Intake Process?

A project intake process is how your agency manages and tracks work requests. When clients want to work with you, they fill out a form or hop on a call with someone in your team to explain what they need. 

This form goes to a manager of the project lead, who reviews it, approves it, adds it to a queue, and assigns it to an available team member. 

In other words, it helps you capture project requirements through forms, route requests to team members, and prioritize projects better. 

A proper project intake process should give you; 

• A clear view of all work in progress, including which team member is working on which task. 
• Control over your team's workload. 
• Consistent quality of work, especially when you use an intake form template for similar projects. 

The goal of an effective process is to ensure your team is not overwhelmed with random requests or taking on work that doesn't exactly fit the services you offer. 

Signs You Need To Change Your Project Intake Process 

Your team's productivity depends on what projects you take, how you assign them, and the work environment. If you're having issues getting these in order, look out for these five things: 

1. You Process Everything Manually

If you work with different clients, you're likely to receive multiple project requests at once. Unless you use a centralized project management tool like ManyRequests, clients are most likely to send requests through different email threads. 

You'll loop designers, writers, and editors into these long email threads, and they have to scramble to find details, organize them into briefs, and take them back to their work board. If they're looped into more projects at once, it may become overwhelming. 

It's also not great for you. A designer who bills $100/hour could waste $45 of every hour trying to understand client briefs.

The best solution to this is to automate your processes. ManyRequests automates your entire intake process through an all-in-one project management system. 

Here's how: 

If a client visits your branded portal on ManyRequests and selects a design service from your service catalog:

ManyRequests provides a customizable service request form that asks all the necessary questions you need to know about the project— brand guidelines, website goals, page requirements, and competitor examples. 

When the client fills and submits it, ManyRequests automatically; 

• Creates converts it into a task in your dashboard
• Shows you a dashboard of existing tasks your team is working on, so you know who's available and who's not. 

• Lets you assign tasks to the available team members and set priority levels and due dates. It also gives visibility to due dates without opening a specific task to see task details. 
• Stores all project files and communication in one place. 

This way, your team members only need to check their dashboard, see assigned tasks, and get straight into work. If they need clarification, they can use the built-in messaging to ask questions. 

Learn how ManyRequests manages projects and teams with a 14-day free trial— no credit card required. 

2. Project Requirements Keep Changing 

Having a channel to funnel work requests is great, but you still need to turn these requests into projects. 

Let's say your designer worked 6 hours on a homepage, but the client wants a new layout after submission. Your team starts over, and you waste time and money on revisions instead of new projects. 

To fix this, create a detailed form for each service that clients can fill out to avoid back-and-forth on the project. 

For websites: 

You can ask clients for details on their vision for; 

• Site map. 
• Structure. 
• Whether they want animations. Website content. 
• Design colors. 
• Design references, etc. 

For social media, you can ask them for:

• Post dimensions. 
• Target audience details. 
• Content guidelines. 
• Campaign goals, etc. 

When clients provide complete information upfront, your team delivers accurate work the first time, and you can avoid endless, unpaid revisions. 

3. Team Members Miss Critical Updates

Your project manager spends hours in client meetings, but key details can get lost in long email threads. They may overlook important information that they wouldn't in a centralized platform. 

Having a structured project intake process makes sure that you collect every project information and share it to team members accordingly. 

And how can you do this? 

You can develop the habit of relying on task chat boxes over email threads. However, you can only get this through project management software for agency owners like ManyRequests. 

ManyRequests allows you to dump every piece of information on a task in the task chat box. This improves collaboration with your team and clients. 

4. You Can't Track Project Progress

If you have to ask, which design projects are due this week? If Paul is still working on that website homepage, or if the client approved the latest logo revision, it shows you're not in control of your projects. 

You can't update clients on their requests because you're not even sure if team members are done with the work. This also means you can't effectively manage your team's workload— it's a nightmare. 

ManyRequests solves this with a real-time dashboard that shows you:

• Every active project and its current status. 
• Which team member is handling each task. 
• Upcoming deadlines and project milestones. 
• The latest client approvals and feedback.

You can also easily show your clients this information through the ManyRequests client portal. With your permission, clients can see the task, who it's assigned to, when it's due, and leave annotations on design documents. 

How To Develop an Effective Project Intake Process

Developing an effective project intake process helps with project prioritization, team collaboration, client relationships, etc.… Here's how to do it: 

1. Map out your current workflow. Note how projects enter your agency — through email, calls, or website forms.

2. Next, design your process to; 

• Create an intake form for each service. Your website design form should ask different questions than a branding form, even if it's the same client. 
• Decide who evaluates new requests. You need someone to check the project details and ensure you have the bandwidth to complete the task within the timeline. 
• Create guidelines for the projects you take. Include minimum budgets, deadline requirements, and scope limitations. This will make it easier to reject projects that don't match your criteria.

3. Automate The Workflow

Automate as much as you can to take the stress off your team. Automate client requests with project management tools like ManyRequests that compile all the requirements and turn them into a project. 

Like ManyRequests, it should also automatically notify your team and client of task status changes so they know when a project is finished or midway. 

If your team charges you per hour, ManyRequests also has an automatic time tracker that tracks your daily time spent. 

ManyRequests also automatically creates an invoice for completed projects; so far, you use the service catalog feature while starting each project. All these help you manage your project and the invoice and billing without manual effort. 

4. Monitor And Improve

Monitor how projects move through your improved process. Pay attention to the common bottlenecks and confusing project types, and use that data to improve your operations. 

Conclusion

Developing an efficient work intake process is simple. Examine how you handle your projects and make corrections where necessary. 

Create custom forms that ask the right questions for every project you handle. Set rules about the projects you take. Then, manage your agency with a tool that allows you to collaborate with both clients and teams in one platform. 

ManyRequests is an all-in-one project management tool that can help you manage client communication and team collaboration from start to finish. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to see how it works.

Originally Posted: March 23, 2022