Why planning for 2026 is more difficult but more important than ever
It's time to do your agency's annual planning, and 2026 feels like a balancing act? On the one hand, there's the uncertain economic situation, on the other, the AI hype (is everything going downhill or are there opportunities after all?) and the constant pressure to get the best out of your teams without burning them out.
If you're finding that traditional planning methods are reaching their limits, you've come to the right place. Planning ‘as usual’ with Excel lists and gut feelings simply no longer works in a world characterised by uncertain budgets, shorter customer relationships and fierce competition for contracts and talent.
Those who plan in a structured manner now will secure more capacity, more clarity and, above all, more success in their agency's day-to-day business in the coming year.
In this article, we'll show you how to master your agency's annual planning for 2026, increase your profitability and finally get a handle on team utilisation.
➡️ No time for the whole article? Get our template for your agency's 2026 annual planning here and get started right away.
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Agencies need integrated solutions that combine real-time data with strategic forecasting to remain competitive and protect their teams from overload.
Why 2026 requires a rethink in agency management
[.toc-name]2026 requires a rethink[.toc-name]
The days of making a plan in January that lasts until December are over. The rules of the game have changed, and so must your planning strategy.
2026 brings new challenges for agencies: uncertain budgets, shorter customer relationships, tougher competition for contracts and talent.
Economic uncertainties & planning pressure
The economic situation will continue to be characterised by fluctuations in 2026. You have to expect sudden changes that will throw traditional budget planning into disarray several times a year.
This means that annual planning in January is no longer sufficient. Instead, you need rolling planning cycles that allow for continuous adjustments.
As an agency manager, you are under increasing pressure to respond more quickly to market changes, while resources remain limited. Many agencies have been experiencing fluctuating order situations and noticeable margin pressure for some time.
In addition, customers often expect more flexibility with fast implementation and consistent quality – a contradiction that you can only resolve with smart planning.
Without professional tools, this quickly leads to a vicious circle: overload causes higher staff turnover, which further exacerbates planning uncertainty.
Without structured planning, projects, team capacities and budgets quickly become unbalanced.
Why traditional planning tools are no longer sufficient
Excel, Trello boards and manual spreadsheets have long been standard practice at many agencies. However, these tools have fundamental weaknesses when it comes to resource planning at your agency in 2026.
The biggest disadvantage is the lack of real-time data. Decisions about capacity planning are based on outdated information because new projects or plan changes are only visible to everyone after a delay. This inevitably leads to wrong decisions.
Added to this is the fragmentation caused by isolated tools – one for projects, one for times, one for capacities, one for billing – oh, and good old email for customer communication. The result is a data silo that leads to errors, duplication of work and dangerous blind spots. The crucial link between team utilisation and economic planning is missing. In the end, no one knows how profitable a project really was.
Especially in times of complex projects, hybrid teams and the use of freelancers, a central overview of utilisation is essential. For future-proof agency management, you need an integrated system that seamlessly connects all areas.
The biggest challenges in annual planning
Pitch pressure & forecast uncertainty
One of the biggest hurdles in agency annual planning is the uncertainty surrounding forecasts for future projects. A new pitch may or may not come in, a client may double or halve their budget – this volatility makes reliable capacity planning extremely difficult for agencies.
Many agencies try to solve this problem with average values. However, an assumed utilisation rate of 60% often leads to some of the team being idle while others are completely overloaded.
The constant pressure to pitch exacerbates the situation: if you win a large contract without having planned your resources carefully, you're in a dilemma. Either you calculate too high and lose the pitch, or you accept the contract too cheaply and jeopardise your profitability. Without intelligent resource planning, every commitment becomes a guessing game.
The solution: implement a systematic forecasting logic. Instead of blocking 100% of resources for uncertain orders, weight your projects according to their status (e.g. quotation, negotiation) and take this probability into account in your capacity planning. This will give you a realistic and flexible basis for planning.
Resource bottlenecks & overload
An alarming figure from the Agency Happiness Report reveals a real problem:
[.b-stats]of agency employees often think about quitting because of a poor work-life balance.[.b-stats]
43%
The main cause of this is often faulty resource planning in the agency.
Teams are constantly running at 110% until sick leave increases and projects are delayed. There is often a lack of transparency regarding holidays, public holidays or part-time models, which makes realistic capacity planning impossible.
The challenge is clear: how do you allocate available resources so that no one is overworked or underworked?
The answer lies not in Excel spreadsheets, but in an integrated system that shows you live who is working on what and what capacities are actually available. This is the only way to improve team utilisation, make realistic commitments and increase the profitability of your agency in the long term.
‘We do it differently every year’ – not a scalable process
‘Every year, we have to rebuild our annual planning from scratch.’ If this sounds familiar, then you are missing a standardised, scalable process for agency annual planning.
Ad hoc improvisation not only costs valuable time, but also leads to a high error rate, as important knowledge is anchored in individuals rather than in the system. Your agency loses efficiency because planning does not grow with it and learning effects from previous years are lost.
Successful agencies define their planning process once, implement it in a central tool and refine it continuously. This not only saves effort, but also creates reliability and finally makes your resource and capacity planning scalable. The key to this often lies in the right project management tool for your agency.
[.b-button-primary]Efficently execute project plans[.b-button-primary]
What does annual planning for 2026 mean for agencies?
[.toc-name]4 levels of annual planning for agencies[.toc-name]
Successful agency annual planning is not a rigid document, but a dynamic system. You can build it on four interconnected levels to increase your agency's profitability and improve team utilisation.
4 levels of planning: revenue, resources, projects, utilisation
- Revenue planning: Forget wishful thinking. Your revenue targets are based on hard data: existing contracts, retainers and realistic forecasts for new business. This is how you create a solid economic foundation.
- Resource planning: What skills and roles do you need to achieve your revenue targets? Professional resource planning for your agency takes into account not only the number of people, but also their actual availability (full-time, part-time, freelancers) and the planned billability of each team member.
- Project planning: Which projects are confirmed and which are in the pipeline? Good planning allows you to run through different scenarios and identify the impact on your resources in advance, before bottlenecks arise.
- Capacity planning: This is where everything comes together. Based on projects and resources, you can see who is working on what and when. The goal is efficient capacity utilisation without bottlenecks or idle time. This is not a one-time task, but a rolling process that keeps your capacity planning alive.
What does good annual planning need today?
Successful agency annual planning today stands or falls on three key factors. Only when these are met will your planning become a real management tool.
- Transparency: Everyone in the team – from management to individual employees – must be able to see at any time what the utilisation looks like and what resources are available. Project managers planning new projects must be able to immediately see whether the capacity is available. This prevents wrong decisions based on outdated information.
- Flexibility: Your planning should not be a rigid construct. It must be dynamic to allow for quick adjustments. Only then can you respond to new projects, redistribute resources agilely and avert impending overload in the team before it becomes a problem.
- Real-time data: Live figures are the basis for everything. Modern capacity planning constantly compares planned hours with the actual hours recorded. This is your early warning system: you can immediately identify budget and time deviations and take timely countermeasures to ensure the profitability of your agency.
[.b-important-block]A spontaneous request comes in and you wonder who can take it on? The integrated awork AI does exactly that for you. Since all relevant information about projects, skills and availability is already bundled in awork, it analyses the current workload and can directly suggest who in the team is best suited to accept the request. This makes flexibility a breeze.[.b-important-block]
[$tag]💡 Smart support from awork AI[$tag]
[.b-button-primary]More about awork AI[.b-button-primary]
Smart solutions for capacity planning & team utilisation
[.toc-name]Smarter capacity planning[.toc-name]
Difference between utilisation and productivity
To really improve team utilisation in your agency, you need to understand a crucial difference: that between utilisation and productivity. The two can easily be confused, an expensive mistake that puts unnecessary strain on teams.
- Utilisation is the percentage of working time that is scheduled.
- Productivity is the actual value-adding output that your team generates during this time.
The key point is that 100% utilisation does not mean 100% value creation. A team member can sit in meetings all day and jump back and forth between projects. Utilisation is at 100%, but productivity is at rock bottom.
Your goal should therefore never be 100% utilisation. This leaves no room for creativity, spontaneous tasks or buffers and leads directly to overload.
Smart capacity planning aims for economically sensible utilisation that increases your agency's profitability while protecting your team from burnout.
Project work, meetings, internal work, acquisition – everything takes time. But what can really be billed?
How to combine forecasting with realistic resource models
How do you plan projects that are not yet finalised? Blocking all resources for them is risky because it creates artificial bottlenecks. Not taking them into account at all leads to unpleasant surprises.
The solution for smart resource planning in your agency is to work with a tiered logic for project probability. A project with a 70% probability of success only blocks 70% of the estimated resources in your planning.
Smart tools like awork make this super easy. Here you can create projects with different budgets and see live how this affects your overall capacity planning. This keeps your planning realistic and flexible, and you always make data-based decisions.
Use regular retrospectives: look back at the end of each quarter. Were the forecasts accurate? Where were there bottlenecks in capacity utilisation? Use these insights to adjust your planning goals for the next cycle. This way, you continuously learn and can improve team utilisation step by step.
Tools & workflows for efficient agency planning
[.toc-name]Tools for efficient agencies[.toc-name]
You have identified the challenges and understood the strategies. Now you need the right tool to support you. But what does good agency software really need to be able to do today?
The 5 must-haves of good agency software
Modern software for your agency Annual planning is more than just a to-do list. It is the central nervous system of your agency and must meet these five core requirements:
- Real-time visual capacity planning: You need to see at a glance who is available. An integrated team calendar that displays availability, holidays and projects live is the basis for realistic resource planning in your agency.
- Linking planning and profitability: Planning and time tracking should not be separate worlds. The tool must link planned times directly to recorded hours and budgets so that you can keep an eye on the profitability of your projects at all times.
- Smart forecasting functions: Your software must help you deal with uncertainties. The ability to plan projects based on probability is crucial for creating realistic utilisation forecasts.
- Simple and intuitive operation (UX): The best tool is useless if no one on the team uses it. A simple, intuitive interface ensures high acceptance and guarantees that the data you use for planning is truly up to date.
- Seamless integrations: Your agency software must fit into your existing tool landscape. Interfaces to accounting, CRM and calendar tools are essential to avoid data silos and reduce manual work.
Why awork is the better choice for agencies
Tools such as Asana, ClickUp and Monday are powerful all-rounders. However, they often fall short when it comes to the dynamic day-to-day work of an agency because they were not built for the specific workflows of agencies. Here you can see the advantages of awork over generic tools:
Target Group & Workflows
✅ Specially designed for agencies and project-based teams.
Capacity Planning
✅ Intuitive, visual resource planning & workload view.
Integrated Time Tracking
✅ Native time tracking, directly linked to projects & budgets.
External Collaboration
✅ Onboard clients and freelancers easily and for free.
Data Protection (GDPR)
✅ 100% GDPR compliant, with hosting on German servers.
User-Friendliness (UX)
✅ High user adoption thanks to a simple and beautiful interface.
awork is the No. 1 project platform for agencies because we understand that your everyday life doesn't fit into rigid plans.
We built awork specifically for highly dynamic, project-based teams. Unlike other tools, we focus on fast, reliable planning that works even when everything is in chaos.
That's why 10,000 teams and leading agencies such as thjnk, fischerAppelt and pilot are already working happier and more productively with awork. 💜
[.b-button-primary]More agency insights[.b-button-primary]
The awork template for your 2026 annual planning
[.toc-name]Template: annual planning[.toc-name]
Enough theory, let's get started! To make it as easy as possible for you to get started with structured planning, we've created a simple template for you. It will help you set up your annual planning.
[.b-button-primary]Plan your year in awork[.b-button-primary]
[.no-toc]Conclusion: Make 2026 your best-planned year[.no-toc]
Annual planning for 2026 may be more complex than ever before, but it is also your greatest opportunity. In an uncertain economic situation, clear, data-driven management is not a ‘nice-to-have’ but the decisive factor for your success.
In summary, this means for you:
- Rigid plans are out: rely on flexible, rolling planning processes.
- Excel is no longer enough: use an integrated tool that combines planning, time tracking and profitability.
- Utilisation is not everything: aim for productive and healthy team utilisation instead of pushing your team to 110%.
Agencies that structure their processes today will not only work more efficiently tomorrow, but also in a much more relaxed manner. The result is greater clarity, better economic control and healthy team utilisation that retains your best people.
Are you ready to take your agency to the next level and finally have control over your projects and resources in 2026?
Start your free awork trial now and use our template to master your agency planning!
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