Before you invest in internal tools

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Before you spend anything on internal tools, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• The spreadsheet everyone fears is a specification
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

What to watch for

Internal tools rarely need to be beautiful, but they must be reliable. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Time saved compounds every single week. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

How to tell if yours is fine

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about internal tools before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Internal tools rarely need to be beautiful, but they must be reliable — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.