Marketing Project Management Basics

Project Management is a fairly new business discipline that’s gaining traction in more industries and companies every day. Because of its left brain origins, project management is not a natural fit for marketing departments. The reality is that project management can revolutionize the role of creative teams within an organization.
The good news is that project management can be introduced in phases. Start with the basics of time management, collaboration, documentation and communication.
1.Have the team document their time. Although often construed as micromanaging this is actually a powerful time management technique. It’s an eye-opening exercise when employees can see where their time is being spent. This also lays the foundation for you to start documenting time allocations for future tasks and projects.
A couple of key concepts to follow; 1) provide a simple tool for time tracking — there are a number of web-based products, and 2) alleviate stress and avoid inaccurate data by following current research and setting the expectation of five hours of actual project time each day.
2.Encourage collaboration. Break the cycle of employees putting on headphones and disappearing into a document or design for days on end. What’s clear in the mind of one person may be confusing to others and a grammatically correct sentence may lack the flow needed to be easily read and understood.
Through formal or informal collaboration among team members, these issues are brought to light early in the process. This eliminates resistance to making changes after many hours of personal investment in a piece and avoids costly delays late in the process. Bottom line, collaboration improves job satisfaction through the open exchange of ideas.
3.Create project documentation. Do you have conversations in passing only to come under attack days later because the other person constituted that as a project request? Do you frequently run over schedule because of project creep through ever-changing requirements?
It’s vital that you establish a formal project submission process and create a scope document before work begins.
The key to a scope document is to provide as much detail as possible. This ensures everyone involved is clear on their role in the project and outlines exactly what Marketing will deliver upon completion. The scope document should be read and signed by someone as high up the org chart as possible. The project criteria can be changed during production but requires review and amendment of the scope document.
4.Provide consistent communication. Once a project is started, meet weekly or bi-weekly with key stakeholders and team members to communicate progress and resolve issues. The “big idea” people in your company will resist these meetings because they don’t like to be bothered by details. The reality is that these meetings are absolutely critical to keeping projects on schedule.
This is a deal breaker. If a client – internal or external – refuses to maintain these progress updates, you need to walk away from the project because you’re being set up to fail.
Even at its basic level project management can seem overwhelming and intimidating, that’s because you’re changing the culture of the entire organization. I promise you the effort will pay dividends.
Marketing needs to be a driving force in the success and growth of any company. Without the proper documentation and structure, however, marketing becomes an easy target when revenue stagnates or declines. Project management protects your interests and ensures informed decision making at all levels of the organization.

Making the Business Case for Project Management

Organizations Need Effective Project Management for Business Growth and Sustainability
Corporate strategies often rely on project management for business growth and sustainability. As more and more companies recognize the value of effective project management, demand for skilled project managers continues to grow.

What Can Project Management Do for Business?
There are two elements at play concerning the business case for project management. The first is the question of why an organization needs project management in the first place, while the second relates to when to implement project management for business initiatives.

A Means to an End: Project Management for Business Goals
Some companies need to be sold on the benefits of implementing project management for business reasons, and this would be a general instance of making the case for project management as an in-house process.
Companies that start small and subsequently experience significant growth may find it difficult to keep key stakeholders on the same page and ensure the cooperation of all departments involved.
The project sponsor – or the person being held accountable for its key deliverables – should address upper management and explain the importance of project management for business success, as it provides structure and facilitates collaboration toward a common goal
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Securing Project Approval and Obtaining Project Management for Business Initiatives
Once an organization has accepted project management a means to achieve efficiency and ensure accountability, the task remains of identifying which projects will be carried out, and which of those require a dedicated project manger.
Executives often expect to see the potential gain before committing resources to project management for business initiatives.
Projects go through several phases of development, and the first is known as the strategy and business case phase. This is when the individual or group that is sponsoring the project will attempt to “sell” it to upper management, by making a case that the project will yield a positive return on investment.
The sponsor will usually gather the stakeholders who would play a role in bringing the proposed project to fruition and collaborate with them to create an effective presentation that indicates a high potential for the project’s ultimate success.

It begins with a carefully written proposal that details the responsibilities and deliverables of all contributors. Without this, a project will rarely gain the momentum that it needs to move forward. Decision-makers must be convinced of the value of project management for business goals before they will allocate resources to a project.

Making the Case of Project Management for Business Success
Whether you’re a project sponsor looking to secure project management services or a project manager seeking to build a more compelling business case, you can gain the tools and strategies you need through a good project management training program.

Too Much Project Planning Be Bad For Your Project?

Planning a project is vital to its success but some restraint is necessary during the planning stage. If the planning phase takes on a life of its own it can waste valuable project resources.
One of the essential parts of a well-run project is the project plan which will include not only the schedule but various other plans such as a communication plan, risk plan, quality plan. A good plan is fundamental to the success of any project and every project manager will spend a substantial proportion of their time first of all putting the plan together. This will include breaking the work down into manageable tasks that can be monitored easily, assigning resources, obtaining estimates, setting milestones and more. Once the project is underway a large part of a project manager’s time will be spent monitoring and controlling each project task through reference to the schedule and adapting it where necessary to fit a clearer understanding of the tasks as the project progresses.

So if you know that a considerable amount of effort will go into re-working the plan as the project develops, what is a reasonable amount of time to spend putting in place the initial plan? That question is impossible to give just one answer to because all projects are different. Very complex projects will, obviously, need a considerable amount of planning up front but it is important to recognize when too much time spent on planning is a waste of valuable resources and that it might be more important for the project to get started and enable stakeholders to see some progress.

If you find yourself in the situation where planning meetings have become a regular part of your weekly activities and at each meeting something new is discussed about the plan so that it needs to be updates then your project is not making real progress.

So instead of trying to achieve the impossible and create a perfect plan at the start of a project, simply plan in revision points at which you can review the plan and make modifications without impacting too much on the progress of the tasks. This will give those working on the project tasks some breathing space at regular intervals to take stock of progress and re-group resources. It is also a good opportunity to re-evaluate the business objectives – particularly on long projects where the initial aims can change over a period of time.
The amount of time spent planning any project should not take up a disproportionate amount of time compared with the estimated time required to complete the project. Just as a project only needs a few stakeholders so the planning phase should be restricted to just a few individuals – if too many people become involved it will become difficult to reach agreement. It is also important to ensure that discussions do not continue to go over old ground – once a decision has been made stick to it and don’t allow individuals to raise issues of contention again and again once they have been resolved.

So next time you find yourself in the position where you are struggling to get the planning phase of a project finalized just take the existing plan, add a review point date to it and get started. Whilst project management methodologies such as APM or PMP recognize the importance of planning documentation as a reference for managing a project it is sometimes more effective to place the emphasis on activities that will produce a tangible deliverable.

The Cost of Bad Project Management

Projects often fail because organizations put more emphasis on rational factors than on employees’ psychological engagement — and the cost to organizations is enormous.
When it comes to project management, most organizations put their practices before their people. They place more emphasis on rational factors — the process itself — and less on emotional drivers that could lead to project excellence — like their employees’ engagement with the project and company.
But forcing team members to adapt to project management processes and procedures makes it more likely that the project will fail. The resulting cost from bad project management is reaching astronomical levels. It represents a significant waste of money, and it poses a threat to organizations that rely on the success of large-scale projects.

Gallup’s behavioral economics research suggests a different, more powerful approach: behavior-based project management. This approach enables project groups to gain higher levels of emotional commitment and performance from their team members — and increased levels of emotional involvement from stakeholders — in a way that improves both engagement and performance.
Behavior-based project management applies the principles of behavioral economics to manage an organization’s emotional economy. More importantly, it uses scientific research on human nature and the workplace to develop more effective project teams and to enable better project delivery.

The High Cost of Failure
Project management is integral to the business world. Milestones, kickoff meetings, deliverables, stakeholders, Gantt charts, and work plans constitute the everyday world of most managers, whether they are called “project managers” or not. Given the vast experience organizations have with project management, it’s reasonable to wonder why all projects aren’t completed on time, on scope, and under budget.
Yet large projects, especially those in the information technology sectors, have a poor record. Multiple studies show that a significant share of projects overrun their original timelines or are never completed. A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which reviewed 10,640 projects from 200 companies in 30 countries and across various industries, found that only 2.5% of the companies successfully completed 100% of their projects. A study published in the Harvard Business Review, which analyzed 1,471 IT projects, found that the average overrun was 27%, but one in six projects had a cost overrun of 200% on average and a schedule overrun of almost 70%. And we all have heard about large construction projects — the Channel Tunnel, Euro Disney, and Boston’s “Big Dig” — that ended up costing almost double their original estimate.
Cost and time overruns also have a profound effect on national economies. One estimate of IT failure rates is between 5% and 15%, which represents a loss of $50 billion to $150 billion per year in the United States. Another study estimated that IT project failures cost the European Union €142 billion in 2004.
While bad project management comes with an enormous price tag, the costs aren’t always just financial. The seven deaths resulting from the Columbia Shuttle disaster have been attributed to organizational problems, including a weakened safety culture at NASA. The failure of the FBI’s Virtual Case File software application cost U.S. taxpayers $100 million and left the FBI with an antiquated system that jeopardizes its counter-terrorism efforts.
What’s more, it seems that this trend is here to stay. With an ever-growing need for accessible and integrated data, organizations require larger platforms to manage supply chains, customer relationships, and dozens of other crucial systems. Mega-software projects are now common in private and governmental organizations. Development is not slowing down, especially in emerging economies.
Considering the failure rate of these endeavors, a great deal of human effort and organizational resources likely will be squandered. So why haven’t organizations become better at managing projects, especially large ones in the IT sector?
Why Most Projects Fail
A typical project management approach focuses on processes, policies, and procedures. Every task and step is described in detail by a set of rules. Many companies implement rigid processes that dictate behavior and use statistical methods to control quality (such as total quality management, kaizen, lean management, and Six Sigma). Process guides and rulebooks support work practices, while quality control systems assess and improve these practices.
In spite of these approaches, the rate of project failure does not seem to be decreasing. That’s because current project management tools, techniques, and theories account for the rational components of project management, but they overlook the emotional components. And these emotional factors account for a large part of a project’s success.
Project delivery requires quality control, scheduling, and budgeting. Yet controlling for these factors does not prevent project delays or failure. When projects fail, it usually can be traced to one or more of the following causes:
• technical (technology developed, project management techniques)
• individual (project leadership, scope management, communication)
• stakeholder (user involvement, executive buy-in, goal specificity)
Typical project management techniques such as quality control, budgeting, scheduling, and critical path analysis are good at solving the first type of problem. Their record is less impressive for solving the second and third type of problem, primarily because these techniques are less effective at managing the human, emotional, and social factors at play in individual and stakeholder problems.
Open A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, and you will see an array of techniques for controlling quality, risk, budget, schedule, and scope. There is a chapter on project human resources management with some keys to select, develop, and manage a team. It shows how to develop a responsibility assignment matrix to define team members’ roles and a resource histogram to manage available hours. It indicates the importance of recognition and performance evaluations and suggests how to use interpersonal skills to resolve conflicts. It’s all spelled out in black and white, often with charts.
None of this is wrong. But again, these techniques mainly address rational factors such as planning and controlling. They only provide more methodologies and processes and more charts and graphs, which is hardly emotionally engaging for project team members — or project managers, for that matter.

Why Project Management Suffers

We’ve all heard the horror stories: the highway that was not going to cost a penny more than a quarter of a million dollars and ended up over a billion. The convention center that opened two years behind schedule. The computer system that doubled its estimates, tripled its schedule, and still didn’t work properly.
What’s going on here? Why do so many projects run into so much trouble? Why can’t companies and governments, that have had years of experience in projects, seem to get it right? After all, there are professionals, called “project managers,” who are supposed to be running projects and whose job is to keep them on budget and on schedule. Why do so many of them fail?

Project management is management. In many ways, it’s not the same as line management, and it uses different tools and techniques to achieve its goals, but its purpose is the same as that of line management: to direct a group of people to achieve an objective. Therefore, those who manage projects need to know how to manage budgets, people, and processes.

Why, then, do so many companies assign senior technical people-who usually have little interest in or aptitude for management-to head up projects? These companies wouldn’t dream of assigning just anyone as an architect, or designer, or developer; they look for qualifications, for some evidence that the person can actually do the job, so why are they so casual when they assign a project manager? The main reason is that companies tend to regard the role as secondary: not as important as line management or technical skills, and certainly not as a career goal for ambitious souls.

The result is that projects founder, destroying schedules, shredding estimates, derailing careers, and delivering results that companies accept out of desperation rather than design. In the longer term, those who have managed these commonplace disasters retreat from managing projects and either return to the technical world or move into “real” management. So project managers are not developed, the cycle continues, and the result is that there are too few experienced, qualified people in industries that are project-driven.
How can organizations escape this trap? How can they create a group of trained people who know how to define, plan, and carry out a project?

Here’s a simple suggestion: Create a group of trained people who know how to define, plan, and carry out a project.
Identify people who have an aptitude for managing and who want to progress. Train them; there are many courses and programs available. Provide mentors; there is no end of consultants who can offer this service. Reward them; recognize their successes, correct their problems, and give them career targets to shoot for. Is this a novel idea? Hardly. After all, it’s the same process that organizations follow to create a group of trained people who know how to carry out any specific skill.

Is it expensive? That’s the wrong question. The right question is “Do the benefits justify the costs?” Most managers would agree that spending a hundred thousand dollars to prevent a cost overrun of a million is a great investment. Create a group of trained project managers. It just takes commitment.