The Modern Project Manager

The Modern Project Manager must prioritize tasks, stay on budget, and communicate across multiple departments, and often multiple companies, all while juggling an ever-increasing number of digital tools and platforms.

That’s just the work! They also have to develop new skills, coach their teams and find that precious work-life balance. But how can there be balance with all of that to do? We need to do more with less, which means we simply need to do less and focus on the right things and reduce the distractions to get everything done. So let’s start by looking at one archetypical modern project manager, Max, and exploring his all too typical situation.

Meet Max

Male, early 30’s, works as a marketing manager at eReader company

Managing a Multi-faceted Innovation Project

Max is a 33 year old marketing manager at an eReader company in Austin, Texas. Having recently been tasked with leading the marketing campaign for a launch of his company’s new eReader, Max’s days have quickly become full with both strategic planning and project management activities.

Excitement, and expectations, among the executives at his company is high, as its the first of an innovative new line of products with a social good and sustainability story. The eReeder is encased in bamboo, uses incredibly easy to read digital ‘eenk,’ and is built entirely in Nigeria, where every eReeder purchased results in one donated to a child in Africa.

Tool and Process Overload is Exasperating

Max empathizes with the different collaboration technology preferences of his team members and diverse stakeholders, and does his best to communicate with them on the tool of their choice. However, he is concerned about having everything ready for launch because of how fragmented the communication has become, and how much extra time it takes for him to keep all stakeholders up to date.

Max struggles to manage communications and information between executives, sales department heads, product development, engineering leads, and agency partners, in addition to his own team. This sometimes means he has to send the same or similar messages into 4 different platforms just to cover his bases, especially since several key executives don’t regularly make it to status update meetings. Simple status updates now require him to hold daily phone calls with two different leaders, often late into the night.

He is determined to prove to his marketing director that he is capable of working cross functionally. His company recently hired a Chief Digital Officer (CDO), tasked with improving collaboration between product, marketing, sales, and IT among other responsibilities. The CDO is now working with all department heads to update the job descriptions and performance metrics for evaluating employees, with a focus on integrity, skills development and engagement.

To make his commitment to the project’s success visibly evident to his boss, Max goes out of his way to document the team’s progress on Asana, their project management tool, email, Yammer (company wide communications), and Slack, which his agency partners use to communicate and share files. These extra communications add almost two hours to his day, and because of his dutifulness, the majority of the stakeholders expect and look forward to these daily updates. Still, not everyone sees the updates and he still hosts two weekly status update meetings for different groups due to scheduling conflicts.

File storage and version management have also become complex and time-consuming. Certain marketing collateral and files are needed by his agency partners and NGOs in developing countries, but are housed on a local file server that third parties cannot access. Because the process of getting formal approval to share files is too protracted, Max has a Dropbox account where he stores files to share with third parties. Also, Max receives a number of files via Yammer, Skype, or Slack, and often has to go back through archived conversations to find the most up to date version. Since there is no official naming convention for files, this process can be extremely tedious. He also knows he is running afoul of company security policies, but is left with little choice due to the lack of IT integration across the different systems used by stakeholders across his ecosystem.

Family and Personal Health Suffers to Maintain Project Health

Lately, he’s been exhausted trying to get a sense of whether or not progress on the project is happening at a fast enough pace. He often has to physically track down his stakeholders from other departments to get an honest update on where things stand. He is on the committee tasked with reviewing various time tracking tools such as Harvest, ACTontime, ALYND and Zoho, but they are met with severe resistance from senior leaders who believe in individuals keeping themselves accountable to each other.

Since many of these senior leaders have incredibly full calendars, he not only has to schedule a meeting up to three weeks in advance, but has to meet either before the workday begins, or late in the evening. Many times, these meetings end up being cancelled last minute after he has arrived early or stayed late. He’s starting to regularly miss family commitments, which has strained his relationship with his wife and led to gaining 15 pounds on this project alone from the lack of sleep and exercise.

Seeking Clarity, Focus, and Accountability Amidst the Complexity

Max wishes there was a way to consolidate, visualize, and prioritize the needs and requests from the stakeholders in his different work streams. He realizes that his productivity would dramatically increase if he did not have to input and reformat the same information into multiple platforms and communication channels. His goal would be to stay focused on the key priorities related to the launch, and quickly identify the risks and roadblocks associated with broken processes, or people struggling to complete their tasks on time. At the same time, he needs to minimize the amount of additional noise and distractions he is facing that often steal hours from his day.

He knows the project would be more successful if all stakeholders had more visibility into the project’s overall health, including profitability, alignment, and team morale, so that they could be proactive in removing roadblocks or stepping in to make sure all milestones are met on time and on budget. A central view of the entire project would also enable team members to prioritize their activities and tasks more effectively, which would only improve profitability, alignment, and morale all the more.

If everyone was able and willing to go to one place to see the real time status of all the various work streams as well as the progress being made against key objectives, Max thinks he could recover hours from every day which he could use to take the corporate training that HR is now requiring. While he knows there are several different solutions out there to do this, past efforts to get his extended global team of employees and partners on the same page have failed.

A New Conversation

Please join us on this journey by completing this quick poll, extending the concepts in this article and sharing your thoughts using the hashtag #ReOrg . For more about the idea behind ReOrg and how it relates to the Modern Project Manager, please read this post, “It’s Time For a Forward Thinking Conversation, It’s Time for A #ReOrg”.

Questions to consider:

If you are a project manager or a member of a team like this, does the situation feel familiar to you? What do we have right? What do we have wrong? What are other challenges or issues preventing the modern project manager from achieving their full potential? What stories might you share that will help us develop a better understanding of the Modern Project Manager?

We will be reviewing the poll responses, your thoughts and other insights from the conversation over the weeks ahead to write a followup piece that will dive more deeply into the solutions.

This is the beginning of an effort to better understand the world of the Modern Project Manager, their challenges, their opportunities and to develop better solutions that will help them get control, get ahead and get more done with less effort. This collaboration arose from several discussions between Chris Heuer and Brian Barela around Chris’ new SaaS solution for team productivity, Alynd, and their mutual interest in advancing a better way to work smarter together.