Part Three of Four

Art departments, marketing firms and creative agencies have a unique challenge when it comes to project management.   How do you distinguish between operations and projects when you do projects for a living?

Making this distinction helps you empower your project managers to be true agents of change.  This distinction gives them room to be linchpin project managers.

Picture an art department, marketing company or creative service firm. They keep the lights on by doing unique things.  Their job is to come up with new designs, new campaigns, new slogans, new websites, new whatever.  True to the definition of a project, they are unique undertakings, there are fixed deadlines and there are risks involved. But this is something they do every day. It is the day to day operations of the company.

This blurs the line between operations and projects.

In these situations, most creative firms turn to the talent to deliver the results.  And, without question, the talent is key.  But project management has a large role to play and a project manager can be a big contributor to the whole process.  The project manager can help you deliver remarkable results for your clients.

Unfortunately, what often happens though is that the project manager gets relegated to a secondary role. They become minders of the talent or administrators of the work.  They get stripped of the value they can provide.

The challenge here is to give a project manager the space and authority to manage the project. A project manager can actively contribute to the work product and, over the long term, to the work process,  to make it great.  They can be instrumental in making sure creative juices are flowing towards making the customer happy and the team efficient.

Here are some results a linchpin project manager can deliver.  A project manager can improve turnaround time on projects or increase speed to market and help create better campaigns.  They can give you information on how to keep the company profitable or how to avoid doing a ton of work for free when you’re pitching a client. Bottom line, a project manager can give you ideas on how to create better stuff than you currently are.

One great example of how they can do this is insisting on a  creative brief for every project. Instinctively most designers know that this would improve the whole process.  A project manager can make sure that the first question asked when starting a new project is “Why are we doing this?” so you can spend your time wisely,  as opposed to “ok…what’s the first task?” and hope that you deliver what the client wants.

Give it a try on one project. Let the project manager actually manage the project and the people. Let them contribute and shine. You might be surprised at the tremendous results they can achieve for you.

Part Two of Four

In the last article we introduced the concept of  Linchpin Project Management.

• Linchpin Project Management fosters linchpin project managers;
• A linchpin project manager is someone who drives change in an organization.
• A linchpin project manager needs to be willing to be a driver of change, as a person and

A linchpin project management environment

fosters remarkable change and can make

your company indispensable to your customers.

This article focuses on one factor that determines the environment for project management.

Operations or Projects?
Is the project manager working on operations or projects?

This might seem like an academic distinction, but it is fundamentally important in how the project manager sees their role in the organization and the standards to which they are held.

For example, if they manage operations, the fact that the business is still going means they are doing their job.

But if they manage projects, they are doing their job only if the company keeps improving.

Operations are things you do every day to keep the lights on, the company working and customers happy.

Projects are unique undertakings. They have a distinct start and end date. Often they are used to help move operations from status-quo to some new (and hopefully improved) state. A project means change.

A project manager is, therefore, in charge of something unique, something that is bringing change. Something that’s never been done before.

People who run operations are sometimes called project managers. This is because the operations of the company require producing distinct work- product for specific clients.

(I see this a lot in creative groups like marketing or art departments.  In fact,  the next article in this series is dedicated to project management for marketing or art departments.)

Calling an operations manager a project manager leads to confusion, accentuates the project administration role and dilutes the role a project manager can have as an instigator and facilitator of change.

Don’t get me wrong, every company needs project administrators. They are indispensable to the smooth flow of operations. But there is a difference between project managers and administrators.

Project managers are linchpins that get things done. Projects are all about change and project managers are all about making change a reality.

Bringing it back to Godin’s recommendation – to have a linchpin project manager, decide whether the role you have called “project manager” is one to oversee what it takes to keep the lights on, or if it truly is a position of change.

If it is a position of change, let the project manager ask tough questions of the stakeholders and the team, let them question why things are being done a certain way, let them hold people accountable. Then, they can be agents of the remarkable.

Stay tuned to the next article in this series for further guidelines on how to create a culture of linchpin project management.

Part One of Four

Seth Godin has built buzz with his latest book “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?”

His message is that people need to carve a passionate role for themselves in their work, a role that employers and customers simply can’t live without.

His message resonates loudly in the world of project management.

Project managers should step up and “run” projects, actively,  rather than “administer” them, in a passive sense.  Project managers should be linchpins.

What mistakenly passes for a project manager in many organizations is an interested passenger, a project administrator, rather than a driver.

The linchpin project manager is a driver -and agent of change.

Seth Godin drew this same conclusion and  wrote about it.  In this series, I’ll recommend steps you can take to create a culture of linchpin project management.

Organizational Factors
For an employer or manager, hiring the right person is only part of the equation.

Organizational and corporate culture factors can determine how much of a linchpin a person can be. By understanding these factors employers can implement a linchpin culture for project management. By getting these factors right, an employer can not only make it easier for a linchpin to shine but also create an environment that fosters linchpin project management.

This is a culture that drives remarkable change and can make your company indispensable to your customers.

Stay tuned to the next article in this series for recommendations on how to create a culture of linchpin project management.

Last week I gave a presentation at the Internet User Experience conference on Social Networking, Permission Boundaries and User Adoption.  Based on the many requests for it, the presentation is now available online.

The presentation introduces a framework for deciding which social media components to include in your company or in any software you run.

Given the tremendous growth of Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks, many companies and organizations are rushing to add social media components to their software or marketing mix.  However, there is little in the way of how to decide on what to implement nor how to figure out if people will use it or interact with it.

The presentation takes a classic user adoption approach (the user’s cost/benefit calculation on whether some is a pain to do or not) and applies it Social Media components.

It introduces the concept of PERMISSION BOUNDARIES as a way of capturing the cost side of the equation.

It recommends identifying and describing specific SOCIAL TRANSACTIONS to capture the target benefit the user is going for.

This should provide a robust way to help make decisions on what will likely work or not, to think about whether people will interact with your company or not before you invest in the social media tools they could engage with.