What to ask your agency about internal tools

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on internal tools, these questions are worth asking early.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

The spreadsheet everyone fears is a specification. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Time saved compounds every single week. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The short version

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. 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 are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.