Wirelab’s ABC of Project Management
Project management is often not understood by people who are, well, not project managers. However, a happy ending to a project depends heavily on how the project is managed.
Needless to say, if you’re starting a project with an agency or partner, it’s beneficial to understand the basics of project management and how your colleague in this collaboration goes about it. That’s why we’ve written this blog, to get you familiar with how we at Wirelab keep our projects running like a well-oiled machine.
As the alphabet is long enough as it is, we’re going to keep things short and sweet. But if you’d like a little more information about how we work, feel free to reach out to us.
Agile
Probably the most well-known term in project management, agile is an incremental approach to project management that tackles project requirements in little chunks at a time. At Wirelab, we use the agile approach in all of our projects as it enables us to deliver results quickly and consistently throughout the project, rather than only at the end.
Balance
Finding the right balance is often what project management at Wirelab is all about. Finding the balance between going the extra mile for our clients and staying within budget, between challenging ourselves and steering clear of burnout, between working on client projects and progressing on our own self-development… you name it.
Cost estimation
Before the start of every project, the costs of the project must be estimated and communicated to the client. The amount of time and other assets needed for each project — like software licenses or models for a video shoot — are carefully calculated by our project managers. This ensures that no one overpays and we have all the resources we need to deliver beautiful end results.
Deliverable
As we are an all-around digital agency, the deliverables that we typically deliver to our clients range from anything such as a sitemap to a logo design to a content marketing calendar. We set up our project workflows in such a way that enables us to produce deliverables for our clients frequently and consistently, giving them the tangible results they want to see.
Evaluation
A key ingredient to any agency’s success is the constant evaluation of each project’s high points and low points. At Wirelab, we take the time to evaluate each project — both after the project and while we’re still working on it — so that we can quickly respond to any situations that may be holding us back. This is how we optimize our work for our clients and ensure that everyone is on the right track.
Financial management
Staying within the budget is one of the biggest challenges project managers face. Our job is to mediate the push and pull between giving the team enough hours to deliver quality work and staying within the client’s budget.
By not making any assumptions about the time needed to complete a project — and by consulting each team member individually instead — I maintain a realistic budget and optimize project spending.
Goal setting
The way goals are set within a project is paramount to the project’s success. We always define a project’s goals in mutual agreement with the client and then communicate them carefully to each member of the team. To make our project goals more approachable and achievable, we take input from the client and the team to break them down into smaller targets.
Human resources management
Putting the right people with the right skills in the right place at the right time is the essence of project-based human resources management. An important part of a project manager’s job is forecasting the needs of upcoming projects and matching their requirements with the skills and availability of each team member.
Issue management
Any project manager will tell you that their day consists mostly of handling issues in all shapes and sizes. As not every problem can be anticipated, our project managers have practiced the art of quickly responding to bumps in the road and remaining resilient when it seems like everything is about to fly off-track.
Jira
Wirelab’s go-to project management software is Jira. While there are a dizzying number of options out there to choose from, we went with Jira because it’s specifically designed for agile project management, making it the right fit for our way of working.
KPI
Each project has key performance indicators, or KPIs, that are put in place to measure how well the project is performing. For example, some KPIs our project managers try to achieve are maintaining the desired ratio of billable to non-billable hours and staying within the allocated time and budget.
Losing overview
One of the biggest fears in project management is to lose an overview of what’s going on. And as there are so many different moving parts involved in any single project, losing your overview can happen surprisingly fast. Our project managers stay on top of things through frequent check-ins with all team members and two project management meetings a week.
Milestone
Milestones are set in order to mark important points along a project’s timeline, such as an important delivery date or the need for a budget check. These milestones act as the benchmarks that our current progress is measured against, in order to determine if the project is on track.
Never-ending story
Sometimes things happen that make the project seem like a never-ending story. Although it’s great when new ideas arise or if a little extra time is taken to make a deliverable really sparkle, these things can cause a project to be postponed over and over. As we never like to postpone our client projects, our project managers know when to draw the line and push the project forward.
Out of scope
When a new idea for a project comes up after the original budget and criteria have already been defined, the idea is considered to be out of the project’s scope. Out of scope ideas are often excellent additions to the project, so our project managers work together with the client to find a way for it to be implemented at a later date.
Project life cycle
A project’s life cycle consists of the different phases it goes through along its path from initiation to closure. At Wirelab, our projects go through five phases: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure. Typically, our monitoring phase lasts the longest, as we like to continue monitoring and optimizing the digital solution we’ve created for our clients.
Quality management
Maintaining the quality of a project’s deliverables is at the core of our project workflow. We pass every deliverable through to our consultants before handing them over to our clients, so that they can check for anything that doesn’t meet our standards.
Relationship management
At times, it feels like being a project manager is more like being a relationship therapist. When dozens of people from different departments all work together on many different projects, it’s only natural that there are disagreements that need to be mediated and conflicts that need to be resolved. With the right amount of patience, empathy, and mediation, our project managers manage to smooth the wrinkles over.
Standup
In a standup meeting, a project’s team members gather together and — quite literally — stand up. The discomfort of standing keeps the meetings short, making it a perfect format for getting snappy updates from everyone. Sometimes the client also joins in, providing an excellent opportunity to clarify uncertainties, ask each other for help, and directly address any (potential) issues.
Time management
As time equals money, the project manager is responsible for justifying to the client the amount of time spent working on the project. Thus, we always maintain a detailed overview of exactly how much time was spent on exactly which tasks. While it’s the team’s responsibility to track their hours correctly, it’s on the project manager to stay abreast of everyone’s time management and adjust for inevitable hiccups.
Up-to-date
Keeping the client up to date on the project’s progress is essential to maintaining a transparent and trustful relationship with them. Aside from a general progress update, we send frequent reports on the number of hours spent on the project, which milestones were achieved, and any problems that occurred.
Variety
No two projects that we’ve done at Wirelab were ever the same. All our digital solutions are tailored to each individual client’s needs, which makes space for each client to bring their own unique requirements and personality to the table. It’s that variety that brings the spice into our agency and keeps us on our toes.
Why?
The question our project managers are always asking is, ‘Why?’ Why are you asking for extra time? Why do you think this solution is the best? It’s questions like these that help our project managers keep a close eye on the project’s direction and a tight rein on its resources.
X-factor
It’s that superpower every project manager has that keeps everything running under control. It’s a mix of sensitivity to people’s needs, resilience against setbacks, patience for when nothing goes according to plan, and enthusiasm that inspires the team to keep on going.
“Whenever we hire a new project manager, we always look for someone who has their own special ingredient that would uplift the project management team and complement Wirelab’s collective X-factor.” — Tessa Nijmeijer, project manager at Wirelab
Yeah!
Whatever project we do, we’re always looking forward to that ‘heck yeah!” reaction from our clients once we’ve presented the end results. No matter how big or small, the grin of approval from a satisfied client is what we’re really in this business for.
Zealous
That ‘heck yeah’ reaction certainly doesn’t earn itself — our project managers enter every project with enough zeal to get any team up and kicking. And the results of all that enthusiastic energy? We’d love to show you ourselves. Take a look at our cases, or let us know how we can impress you using the contact form below.
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And there you have it: the A to Z of project management. Or at least, the A to Z of project management as we like doing it at Wirelab. If the way we manage our projects sounds like a good fit with the way you like your projects to be handled, feel free to reach out and discuss starting a project together! Get in touch using the contact form below. We’d happily have a chat about how we can get your next digital project on the road — handled smoothly and simply by our very eager project managers.
