Lady Gaga has over 10 million twitter followers.

That number makes other brands salivate - and jealous.

They want those kind of numbers. They’d be happy with a fraction of those numbers.

Those numbers, though, are in-line with her total reach, her level of exposure and the way people interact with media.

Human Behavior is a Constant

As mentioned in my presentation on social media, people’s behavior seems to be a constant regardless of the technology used.  80% of all a person’s phone calls are to the same people.  80% of all Skype calls are to the same people.  The medium changed, the technology changed, but human behavior does not.

Lady Gaga’s numbers are no different. They are generally consistent with the levels of engagement across other media e.g. the percentage of an audience that calls into a talk radio show or writes letters to an editor of a newspaper.

Anecdotally, this number tends to be 1-2% of a total audience.  For Lady Gaga, using a total audience of at least 500 million unique members (in mid-2010 total views of her three most viewed videos was over 1 billion), her 10 million plus followers is right in line.

Why This is Good to Know

It paints clear expectations for any social media effort. To get to 10 million followers, an established brand needs to reach 50 to 100 times more people than that.

No doubt, social media makes it easier to reach people and easier for people to engage with your brand. But it is not a panacea for growing your market. That, still requires having something special that people want.

Why Does this Matter for Project Management

1.Technology doesn’t change human behavior. Project management software or other tools facilitate and expand our actions, but they don’t change the fundamentals of how we act.

2. Projects are all about people. It remains critically important to understand people (see Theory of Constraints) to manage and design the right processes for your projects.

Vertabase released a case study today that documents the tremendous success Webbed Marketing, an online marketing firm, has had managing their workload during a phase of rapid growth using Vertabase project management software.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from it:

The time we spent on tracking our own tasks and manually generating reporting can now be spent on direct, revenue generating work for our clients.

and

Everyone from the CEO to an intern can use Vertabase with very little training or explanation.

You can read other great quotes in the case study online or the PDF.

Found these golden nuggets in the PMBOK Guide (4th Edition).

“Monitoring the expenditure of funds without regard to the value of the work being accomplished for such expenditures has little value [my emphasis] to the project other than to allow the project team to stay within the authorized budget.”

“Units of cost are applied per unit of time for the duration of the activity.”

These obtuse phrases are whispering  “keep track of costs” and “tie them directly to deliverables.”

A schedule is a path for creating value within a specified period of time. (It is not simply a long task list with deadlines.) You can measure the value of each point in time on that schedule by attaching a dollar figure to the value being produced. Comparing the dollar value produced against the dollars being spent gives you a great way to measure the worth of your project.

It also helps you decide where to put additional resources when you projects are competing for the same people or dollars. Choose the one that will give you the most bang for the buck, as it were. Where will that dollar spent deliver the most value for the project.

You can improve your decision making, resource management and project scheduling by using percent complete instead of a task list and done/not done status.

Percent complete gives you a status. But it also lets you understand how you are doing relative to your planned schedule, planned number of people on the project and planned costs on the project.

On a job by job basis, you can plan better.

Not only will you know if something is done or not done (and therefore what other tasks need to be completed).  But, you will also know how much work or time or dollars will be needed to get the un-done tasks done.  And, if they’ll be on schedule or on budget.

Longer term, by using percent complete, you’ll be able to notice trends on how well different types of tasks get done or not, the amount of work it takes to get them done and where bottlenecks or cost overruns happen.

This information will allow you to get even better at the work you do.

Which, of course, directly affects your ability to take on other projects, complete existing projects and shift resources to new projects sooner.

I’m a big fan of project management methodology. However, applying formal project management to marketing companies can be difficult.  One of the challenges marketing firms have in adopting project management methodologies as described in the PMBOK Guide (The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 4th Edition) is that they aren’t often described in terms of the types of projects marketing companies or art departments do every day. Nor is the order of events generally the way marketing companies work.

One example of this is the classic approach to time and schedule development. In the PMBOK Guide, a project’s schedule is determined by the number of resources applied to the project and the types of resources applied to a project.  This seems to be a hold-over from manufacturing or engineering (or other projects where the degree of uncertainty is much higher). But it doesn’t apply to a marketing department. For most marketing companies, a project’s schedule is determined by the client.  The client has a specific due date where things have to be ready by to coincide with a holiday season or product launch, event, sales presentation or trade show.

The due date is the same, regardless of the number of resources applied to the project or task.  It needs to be done by the due date.

This gap often drives creative groups to look at Agile project management processes since it sounds faster and looser.  The problem with Agile for marketing companies is that the work doesn’t easily fit into the length of a sprint. The deadlines for a marketing company need to remain determined by a client’s needs or a strategic decision on timing.

For most marketing departments or agencies, neither process nor resourcing decisions drive deadlines.  Clients drive deadlines.

That being said, not even the PMI would argue that every step of every project management knowledge area needs to be used on every project.  The PMBOK Guide is a collection of different best practices held together by one model, one conceptual set of guidelines, rope on how they can all fit together.  But there are many ways of applying the techniques and ideas to different practice areas. And specific practice areas, like marketing, should piece together what works best for them, balancing the benefits of proven and tested processes with the need to meet clients’ needs and to operate as efficiently as possible.

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.

A new case study was released describing how Creativity, Inc. of Van Nuys, California doubled the productivity of their internal art department using Vertabase project management software. The case study looks at performance over the last four years and concludes:

“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.

Tasks lists can be super helpful for creative firms or creative departments (e.g. art departments, interactive agencies, internal marketing or communications) to get more done, manage processes better and to get better information on their work (including tracking billable hours). They can also kill well meaning attempts at implementing project management.

People usually get tripped up by making task lists overly detailed, trying to map every single step in a process. On the other end of the pendulum, people make tasks are so broad that they become meaningless and don’t add any value to getting things done or to providing information to managers.

For project management efforts to succeed in a creative environment, you have to get the task list right. It has to be the right balance between a traditional work breakdown structure (WBS) and an MS Excel based to-do list.

The way to figure out the right combination is to start out by deciding exactly:

A. Why you want a task list i.e. what you are using the list for and

B. What do you want to track i.e. what kind of information you want to track on your projects.

Here are a few of the things tasks lists can be used for along with some guidelines for building truly usefull tasks lists and project schedules around them.

1. Creating Templates. Templates make life so much easier. Once you’ve come up with the right level of detail on your task list, make a template out of it and re-use it for every project. If you do several different kind of projects, create different templates for each one.

Templates have a ton of benefits.

• Templates make it fast and easy to populate a schedule with tasks, dates and even resources and time estimates;
• Templates provide consistent names of tasks so that you can run task reports that compare the status of the same task across all projects and you can;
• Compare how long specific tasks take on one client versus the other or one project versus the other.

2. Categories for Entering Time. The task list becomes a framework for items your team can enter time on. As a rule of thumb, each task should be something to which at least 20 hours of time will be spent. Group together related activities to make up those 20 hour plus tasks e.g. “Browser Testing of Website” instead of “Testing Website on Safari”, “Testing Website on IE8″ etc. On projects lasting 3 months or more, the threshold for a task should be 40 hours or more.

If multiple people are assigned to the same task or if different bill rates are used on different projects, use work types or categories of effort to distinguish the work one person does on a task from the work another person does on a task.

3. Controlling a Process. Here, the manager or team lead creates a task list so they can monitor and give team members specific direction on the steps they need to take. This is an illusion. A manager can specify the projects, goals and deliverables on a project but it is pretty near impossible to make a list of all the tasks that go into the work a creative professional does. Set up major goals as milestones or critical tasks. This will make it easier to track progress (see next item).

That’s not to say that a manager can’t better manage the resources on a creative team. But instead of trying to map out every step of the process, focus on prioritizing which projects and deliverables are most important. This will get you a lot farther than telling someone which steps of the process to work on.

To get a handle on how long a process takes or where there might be room for improvements, spend time with the creative professional to understand how they do their work. Be open to learning, start a dialogue with the professional and be constructive in working together to find process improvements.

4. Track Progress on a Project. Here, the task list is a tool to get a sense of how far along you are in the process of producing specific deliverables. Given the above mentioned difficulty of listing every step that goes into the creative process, focus on having the team members give you an update on the percent complete of a task or deliverable.

For example: instead of having 10 subtasks under “Testing a Website” and determining percent complete by seeing how many of the 10 subtasks are checked-off as done, creating a single milestone task called “Testing a Website” and have the team member enter in that they are 40% done with that task.

(Project management geek-out note: If you track actual versus estimated hours on tasks, as well, you can compare the number of hours used against percent complete to get even more information. This is back of the envelope earned-value management.)

Flagging a few tasks as milestones or as critical tasks will help you focus your project management efforts on those items that impact delivery the most. And if you have trouble getting team members to update the status of all tasks, asking them to update the status of only milestone or critical tasks can be much more palatable.

A Word About Schedules
As a side note, much of traditional project management and traditional management software (like MS Project) will use a critical path to auto calculate a schedule. This idea comes from a world where processes flow linearly and in a relatively predetermine way -and where people often have a small number of things on their plate. This isn’t the case with art departments, agencies, marketing, interactive or with just about any creative processes in general. For a creative group, project management can’t really be about critical path. Its more about getting the right information on a process, increasing efficiencies, great delivery and making good decisions. Other approaches can stifle.

In a creative process, therefore, instead of an auto-calculated critical path, the schedule should be determined

• By your commitment to your client (whether internal or external) and
• Critical tasks should be those which you manually indicate as being of critical importance to your project and schedule.

This gives you and your team the room to apply your own experience and expertise to setting up a project schedule. While, on the other hand, you’re still setting up crucial project gateways that need to be met to effectively track progress, manage the project and delivery on time.