The Value of a Digital Project Manager
A 2015 DPM Summit Recap
I recently had the good fortune of attending the Digital Project Manager’s Summit in Philadelphia, the third annual incarnation of the conference run by the Bureau of Digital, a small organization that also runs events year-round for digital agency owners, operations managers, and creative directors. As someone who had assumed the title of digital project manager at Plank in Montreal just one year earlier, the timing couldn’t have been better. I wasn’t new to overseeing digital projects when I joined Plank — spending almost a decade working in the now tech-driven music business had given me solid footing — but working in an agency environment was a first for me. So after a year spent doing a lot of reading (and plenty of trial-by-fire), I was itching to get among some new peers and get answers to all of my pesky questions.
Professional conferences can typically be useful on a number of levels: networking opportunities; workshops to build skills; even the psychological peace of mind that you get from socializing with other people who do what you do (don’t underestimate the workplace momentum that can be generated after being refreshed by a little professional/social solidarity). The Summit offered all of that. What I enjoyed most about it though (other than discovering what lovely city Philadelphia is), was noticing a couple core themes emerge that really helped to highlight the value of my new profession.
One question that seemed to come up a lot was what, exactly, a Digital Project Manager does. Or in some cases, what a Digital Project manager doesn’t do. Though project management proper has been around for a long time, the DPM is a newer role whose true role is still being defined. The Bureau of Digital’s Brett Harned has been at the forefront of championing and pushing these discussions over the past few years (and his writing has been a great help to me as newly minted DPM). Anyone who’s looking for a primer on the ins and outs of how we facilitate getting digital projects done should definitely start with his contributions. I also recommend Adam Edgerton’s blogs from his time at Metal Toad, which were similarly helpful for me when I was just starting out. (That’s another nice thing about the summit, it’s intimate enough that there’s plenty of opportunity to powwow directly with other industry leaders in attendance; I had a number of great chats with Adam.)
One of the Summit’s more interesting moments for me involved a panel discussion in which Paul Boag, foreshadowing his keynote talk, suggested whether or not ‘Digital Producer’ might be a better title — something I had had in my mind since reading this piece by Mike Swartz at Upstatement, and thinking about all the little things we do at Plank as DPMs to see projects through. Though there was some consensus (among, granted, some pretty established people in the industry) that ‘titles don’t matter,’ I’d argue that they can certainly be helpful when trying to articulate our value to potential clients.
And value, to me, was really the central (if subtle) theme of the conference. From Nancy Lyons opening keynote on ‘Intrapreneurs’ to Paul Boag’s talk on a PM’s unique position to bridge the “gaps between channels, devices, and business silos,” to Dan Mall’s talk on pricing design, if there was one inspiring take-away from the DPM Summit it was this: that good digital project managers can bring an immense amount of value to our companies and our clients, when properly empowered. This was a bit of a revelation for me, insofar as it made explicit a lot of the feelings I’ve started to have as my confidence has grown as a DPM. When I started I saw the job mostly as a kind of mediator between clients and team members, with a lot of timeline and budget managing in between. And sure some days there’s a lot of that. But when projects are running well, I feel less like a mediator and more like a hub where the best digital solutions for our clients can come to light. And that’s fun. We may not be experts in our clients’ fields (though we can get pretty close), or in design or development — but we have the unique position of seeing a project’s complete horizon. That’s a crucial space to occupy. Talk after talk at the Summit seemed to have this as an undercurrent, that being a good DPM (not to be confused with a “good shit DPM” as Sam Barnes would say), really means taking responsibility for a project as if it’s your very own. If not you, then who?
Another theme that kept coming up was identifying goals. From SaraWachterBoettcher’s Content talk to Rob Harr’s great keynote on “Managing a Project from the Last Responsible Moment,” the importance on the prioritization of goals for digital projects seemed to rear its head in every content or process-oriented discussion. And this makes sense, insofar as identifying goals really amounts to a digital project manager’s ability to internalize a client’s real needs. You can’t own a project if you aren’t truly aligned with the circumstances that created it, even if they aren’t yet explicitly stated. We still live in a world where many businesses and organizations skip crucial steps when it comes to planning digital projects. We think too much about the solution before we know the problem. So bringing value to the table, essentially helping a project be valuable to a client, begins with understanding their goals. Often that even means coaching clients through exercises so they can understand and articulate what those are. This has already had a big impact on how I run projects.
One of my favourite smaller sessions of the summit was Jessica Paris’s presentation, “Launch a Big Redesign Iteratively.” Jessica’s talk wasn’t as polished as some of the big keynote presenters, but it resonated with me nevertheless, maybe because I saw the reality of my own role reflected in it. Rather than being some kind of theoretical treatise on why Agile methods are better, she worked her way through an account of a project that, out of real-life oh-shit necessity, needed to be rolled out iteratively. It wasn’t complex, it was just one person, looking at the big picture, identifying the priorities, the real goals, and then figuring out a way to get it done with the resources at hand. ‘There’s someone who brought some value to the table,’ I remember thinking.
I don’t know if Digital Producer is a better title or not, but I do know a couple things: for one, without us digital projects don’t get done. Perhaps more importantly though, when you’ve got a good digital project manager on your hands, you also get the right things done.
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