PMO Leadership: Successful project management in marketing requires a project management tool, so let them have one

As a PMO Manager, what does enterprise project management mean to you and your organization? Is it managing the formal projects of the enterprise applying tools and best practices for project and resource management? Or, is it ensuring that project management as a skill, discipline, and toolset is propagated throughout the enterprise for the use of all those who have the business need for it? Or, is it perhaps both? It is exciting to see that more and more PMOs are taking a leadership position and making it a priority, in addition to their core mission, to ensure that all those business professionals throughout the enterprise that have a project effort, of any kind, to manage can do just that. And one such example of these kinds of enterprise business professionals that have projects to manage can be found in your marketing department.

Marketing professionals have projects to manage all the time. And what is it like to be a marketing program manager or coordinator with a project to manage such as a product launch, a customer conference, a business partner event, a competitive or market research study, etc, etc, etc? Well, there are a number of capabilities that the marketing professional needs to possess and successfully execute. A few that come to mind include:

• Communicator - giving effective presentations, planning meetings, managing conference calls & reporting
• Team Builder - getting the right resources, managing them, and ensuring they meet their deadlines
• Integrator - bringing everything all together
• Expeditor - keeping things going and on schedule
• Coach - advising, mentoring, and motivating
• Juggler - being able to managing many marketing projects and tasks at one time
• Leader - providing direction, taking corrective actions, and maintaining team balance and confidence
• Facilitator - knowing how to manage through the process and through the people

Doesn’t this sound more like project management than marketing? And what about those marketing projects? Many people assume that all marketing work more is simply day to day routine activities such as press releases, product marketing support, publication and advertising reviews, etc. But, what would you call a tradeshow, new media buy, new public relations campaign, a new direct mail campaign, a market analysis study, a benchmark study of competitors, the annual customer conference, a new website or website content upgrade?

These are a project endeavors; every one of them. None of these will likely make the formal IT Project Portfolio, nor should they. But they are definitely more than day to day, routine work. They are projects, marketing projects. And if you don’t treat these endeavors as projects, you will likely end up with serious problems in the delivery of these project efforts. Poor project management results in cost overruns, missed deadlines, unmet customer needs and turnover in key personnel. It is no different in the marketing department as it is in the IT department or PMO.

Most marketing departments are eager, and overdue, in their desire to move past the “just do it” ad hoc approaches in favor of more effective project management. We have all heard the cliché, “people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.” This is especially applicable in marketing projects. And, are the critical success factors in these projects any different than traditional PMO projects? Not really. You have the same:

• Time pressures to develop realistic timelines and deliver on time
• Buy-in and support levels required to obtain
• Stakeholders to keep informed
• Resources to identify, acquire, and manage
• Revenue goals and return on investment to meet
• Scope creep and changes to manage
• Progress to track and problems to manage

And how do these marketing professionals approach these critical successful factors and challenges? Well, they approach them using email, voicemail, and Microsoft Word. Some may venture out to use Excel for their tasks lists. There are so many problems with this.

• It’s totally manual in data calculation
• It’s too hard to make and many any kind of changes to phases or tasks
• It’s too hard to change time or cost data
• There are no automatic updates to schedules
• There is no ability to manage change automatically
• There is no ability to see the ripple effect of project delays
• It’s too hard to show the impact of resource availability
• There is no automatic reporting for stakeholders

In summary, it’s simply not using the right tool for the job. This would be similar to using Microsoft Word to create a spreadsheet. The solution to this problem is a project management tool, any project management tool. There are those that advocate the use of Microsoft Project. Others prefer other tools and even subscription offerings. Which tool you select or recommend for the business professionals to use may not even really matter. Of course it is more important from a PMO perspective to select a tool, an easy tool, and provide the appropriate support and training, if necessary, for the tool. Toward that aim, the focus should be on such things as:

• Moving from email and Word to a PM tool more appropriate for the effort
• Being able to quickly and easily set up the project plan phases and tasks
• Being able to determine if the project can be delivered on time
• And being able to identify and coordinate resource needs

So, if you are a PMO manager, take a moment to think about what the PMO is doing for all of those users on the business side to help them with their projects efforts. Consider making it a priority to establish and make available project management as a skill, discipline, and toolset throughout the entire enterprise for the use of all those who have the business need for it. Take the marketing department as one of many examples throughout the enterprise. Successful project management in marketing requires a project management tool, so let them have one.