Most agency task boards start simple and then quietly fall apart. Someone adds a status called "Nearly done", someone else adds "Waiting", and before long nobody can say what a card in any given column actually means. The board stops answering the one question you need it to answer: where is this piece of client work, and who is it waiting on?

The fix is usually fewer statuses, not more, with a clear rule for what each one means. Below is a five-step workflow that suits most client work, followed by the signs that tell you it is time to add a review step, and the signs that tell you it isn't.

The five steps, and what each one should mean

A status is only useful if everyone agrees on when a task enters it and when it leaves. For each step, write down one sentence that answers both questions.

  1. Requested. The client or an account lead has asked for something, and it has been captured as a task. It does not yet have enough detail to start. Nobody should be working on a task in this column.
  2. Ready. The task has a clear outcome, an owner, any assets or briefs attached, and a rough estimate. Someone could pick it up tomorrow without asking a question. Moving a task here is a small promise that the brief is complete.
  3. In progress. Someone is actively working on it. If a task sits here for a week with no activity, that is a signal worth a conversation, not a status to ignore.
  4. With client. The work has been sent for the client's feedback or approval. The ball is in their court. This step is the one most teams leave out, and it is the one that explains most "why is this still open?" questions.
  5. Done. The client has approved it, or it has been delivered and nothing further is expected. Done means done: if more feedback arrives, the task moves back rather than collecting a second life in the comments.

That is the whole workflow. It is deliberately boring. Its value comes from the fact that a glance at the board tells you which tasks are blocked on a brief, which are being worked on, and which are waiting for someone outside your team.

Rules that keep the workflow honest

Five well-named steps can still drift if people use them loosely. A few habits keep them meaningful.

  • Only one owner per task while it is in progress. Several people can contribute, but one person is answerable for moving it on. If the work genuinely splits, break it into sub-tasks with their own owners; our piece on sub-tasks or checklists covers when that helps and when it adds noise.
  • Feedback sends a task backwards, not sideways. When a client asks for changes, move the task from With client back to In progress. Do not invent a "Changes requested" column unless you have a real reason to track revision rounds separately.
  • Keep the conversation on the task. Briefs, files, client comments and decisions belong in the task's discussion, so anyone picking it up has the full history in one place.
  • Review the With client column weekly. Anything that has been waiting more than a few days probably needs a polite chase. This one habit tends to shorten turnaround more than any process change.

When to add an internal review step

The most common addition to this workflow is an Internal review step between In progress and With client. It means: the work is finished from the maker's point of view, and a colleague checks it before the client sees it.

It is tempting to add this everywhere, because review sounds responsible. But every extra step is a queue, and queues slow things down. Add it when one or more of these is true:

  • Clients are finding mistakes you should have caught. Typos in copy, broken links, the wrong logo version. If the client is acting as your quality check, a review step is cheaper than the damage to trust.
  • Work goes out under the agency's name, not just the individual's. Launch campaigns, pitch materials and anything public-facing usually deserve a second pair of eyes.
  • You have newer team members. A review step gives them a safe place to get feedback before work reaches the client, and gives seniors a natural moment to coach.
  • Several people contribute to one deliverable. Someone needs to check the pieces fit together, and making that a visible step stops it from being skipped under pressure.
  • Revision rounds keep running long. If tasks regularly bounce between With client and In progress three or four times, an internal check before the first send often cuts that down.

When not to add it

Skip the review step for routine, low-risk work: small content updates, internal tasks, retainer maintenance where the same person has done the job many times. Forcing these through review mostly creates a column full of cards waiting on one busy senior.

How to make a review step work

If you do add it, give it the same clarity as the other five steps:

  • Name the reviewer. Either a specific person per project or a simple rule, such as "the project manager reviews anything client-facing". "Someone will look at it" means nobody will.
  • Agree what a pass means. A short checklist in the task description or a project notebook works well: brief met, spelling checked, links tested, files named correctly.
  • Set a turnaround expectation. For example, reviews happen within one working day. Without this, the review column becomes the new bottleneck.
  • Fail forwards. If the reviewer finds problems, the task goes back to In progress with clear comments, not a vague "needs work".

Setting this up in Tilvin

If you use Tilvin, the workflow lives in custom workflows. An administrator defines a process under Advance > Process as a set of ordered, coloured steps, and each project picks the process it uses. Tasks in that project then move through those steps.

A practical way to handle the review question is to create two processes: a standard five-step one, and a six-step version with Internal review between In progress and With client. New projects pick whichever fits. A retainer for website updates might use the five-step version, while a brand launch uses the six-step one. You are not forcing review on work that doesn't need it.

The Kanban board then shows each project's tasks as columns for those steps, and moving a card between columns changes its status. A full Internal review column or a crowded With client column is visible at a glance.

For the review itself, use the task's discussion: the reviewer leaves comments, attaches marked-up files, and uses @notify to flag the task owner. On tasks where feedback has piled up over several rounds, an AI summary of the discussion can pull out the main points and open questions before you reply to the client. You can see how these pieces fit together on the features overview.

Your next steps

You can put this in place this week without a big rollout.

  1. Write one sentence per step describing when a task enters and leaves it. Share it with the team and pin it somewhere visible, such as a project notebook.
  2. Map your current statuses onto the five steps. Retire anything that doesn't fit. Most "Waiting" or "Almost done" statuses turn out to be With client or In progress.
  3. Look at the last month of client feedback. If clients caught errors your team should have caught, add an Internal review step to the projects where it happened, not to all of them.
  4. Name a reviewer and a turnaround time for any project that uses review.
  5. Check the With client column every week and chase anything that has been sitting there too long.

A workflow is only as good as the shared understanding behind it. Keep the steps few, the rules clear, and add review where it earns its place.