Does project management run efficiently at your company? How your employees and teams come together and interface with each other to accomplish business goals and benchmarks can directly affect your bottom line. We’ve determined three key factors to keep in mind when exploring and implementing project management tools.
Rather listen than read? In our latest podcast, Ian Herzing, resource manager here at Level Agency, talks us through project and process management, plus the foundational needs these practices can help companies meet in 2021 and beyond. Check out our most recent episode of Test. Learn. Grow. to hear the full conversation.
Level Agency and the Role of Project Management
In his role as Level Agency’s resource manager, Ian has discovered that marketing agencies don’t really have a defined playbook for project management. There are different project management approaches that map themselves well to specific industries. Agile project management, for example, maps itself well to software development, while the waterfall project management methodology works well in the world of construction. But at Level, we’re working across several different clients, project types and objectives all at once, so our cross-functional teams are given the autonomy to choose the project management tools that will work best for them. That might mean mixing pieces from different methodologies to determine what works well for everyone involved, as well as the desired project outcome. This problem-solving framework fits right into the Level Agency approach of test, learn, grow, and we’re able to apply it to almost any client problem we encounter—marketing or otherwise.
The Level Agency Secret Menu
With this broad approach to project management, the work Ian has done internally has morphed into a not-yet-well-known service offering for clients. We are, of course, a digital marketing agency, but we’d like to expand the understanding of marketing past Google Ads and Facebook. There’s marketing to your external customers, but there’s also internal marketing that happens when you’re introducing a new project to your team, which becomes a lot easier when you have a system in place that sets that project up for success. Our goal is for our clients to see us as partners in finding the digital solutions for project and process management that works for them.
Key Factors for Project Management Success
The business world of 2021 and beyond has been irrevocably been changed by the pandemic—we’ve been forcibly moved into digital environments and operations. And whether you’re working with us to refine your project management processes, or you’re striking out on your own to find something for your business needs, Ian has three key factors to keep in mind.
- Know before you go. Before diving in and deciding on a digital project management process, take a step back and think about the way you do work outside of those tools. Do your projects have long life cycles or do they turnover quickly? And who needs to be involved in your project management? It’s a possibility you can use something as simple as Excel, but maybe it needs to be a more scalable solution, and something like Asana or Jira will fit the bill. Do you have a lot of dependencies? Perhaps Smartsheet or Gantt Charts will work for you.
- What do you want to get out of reporting? A big benefit of digital project management solutions is the data you can pull from them. Want to see scoped hours versus actual hours worked? Make sure the tool you choose can execute that.
- Resource visualization is important. Choose a tool that has some sort of resource visualization capability. This allows an overview of who’s doing what and can eliminate over or underworking any one employee.
And Ian has one more bonus tip for us—execute effective change management. Implementation of a new tool or process can be scary and overwhelming, so approach it with a mix of delicacy and urgency to ensure your team actually thinks the tool enhances the work they do and makes their jobs better.
Feel like you could use some more guidance? Reach out! We’d love to chat about your project and process management opportunities and dig into it.
What did we miss? Give us your thoughts in a comment!
