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.

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.

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.

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.

Before inviting someone to a meeting or sending them an email ask yourself:

Is this information something they’d choose to “follow” on Twitter.

If yes, send it to them.

If not, or if its something you just think they “should” be following, don’t.

This will help keep meetings in check and emails in check and hopefully more aligned with the specific information each person needs to do their job (and not get bogged down in useless information).

As discussed in my recent article in ComputerWorld, this works because Context Trumps Content (as the growth of Twitter makes abundantly clear).  There is no end to the amount information people can find.  What is valuable is not the quantity of information, but the quality of information. To be high quality and valuable, the information needs to be relevant to the recipient.  (And Twitter makes it easy for people to receive only the information they find relevant to themselves.)

“I would strongly recommend Vertabase to coordinate project management activities for internal creative teams. There is absolutely no downside.”

Here are links to the case study, a pdf of the case study and the press release about it.

Change can come from outside the organization, like a change in the laws or the economy. It can come from inside the organization, like a quality improvement initiative.  Or, it can come from the market.  Often, you need to proactively make changes to succeed.

These can include changing the way you do things, changing the products or services you provide or changing how you market those products.

Here is a six step guide to managing change successfully. It connects the dots from the previous two posts (with a philosophical p.s. on the importance of change and good project management).

First, a definition. At its core, change is about going from where you are to where you have to be.

1. Create a work-flow. A good work-flow gives you a picture of your current state.  Analyzing the work-flow can help you decide where you want to go. Use data on the effectiveness of the current work-flow as a baseline against which to compare your future work-flow.

2. Create what you want your future work-flow to look like.  This is your target work-flow. It should be driven by your goals. That is, figure out what it is you want to improve (customer satisfaction, profitability, job satisfaction, costs, etc.) and build a target work-flow that should deliver those improvements.

If change is being imposed from outside your organization (e.g. because of the economy) your target work-flow is about figuring out how to do what you currently do in a different, but equally effective, way.

3. Build a project plan that maps out how you are going to get from here to there. It should tell you the road you’re going to take, who’s getting you there and  how to keep moving forward when you hit road-blocks.

4. Once you get there, once the target work-flow is implemented, measure its effectiveness to see if it meets your goals. Did it improve what you wanted it to?

5. If it didn’t meet your goals, figure out what else has to change and go through the process of creating that change.

6. If it did meet your goals, find another area to improve and do it again.

It has been said that change is inevitable. All things change. Having a process in place to manage change makes it more comfortable and increases your chances of have a successful transition.

On a Philosophical Level:

Economic growth depends on change. If that’s the case, a good project manager, one that can manage change and make positive changes a reality, is an engine for economic growth.

Why make a work flow?
To speed up the time it takes to get things done. So people always know what the next step is and what’s the hold up. To find ways to scale up or scale down with knowledge.

On a philosophical level:
A workflow captures reality and makes it easier to study and work with that reality. It expresses our belief in the wisdom of how we’re currently getting things done and a confidence that improvements will be discovered on the job.

Why make a plan?
A plan shows you how to get things done, despite things going wrong and with an eye to continual improvement.

On a philosophical level:
A good plan is an exercise in optimism and an expression of our belief in our ability to always move ahead.

This is an important tool in developing processes and standards-based management (which is the root of managing for growth).  You can’t make a plan, much less execute it, without knowing what everyone does. The org chart is like an old fashioned program at a baseball game. It tells you who all the players are and what position they play.

An org chart helps point you in the direction of where improvements can come from. It spells out who is responsible for defining a process or work-flow for other people. And to use a thought from the linchpin world, it can show you who is doing something new and unique, or on their own.