Remember the feeling of missing a tough class in high school – the one that required extensive note taking – and the rush of relief you felt when someone was nice enough to share theirs... only to realize upon opening the spiral notebook that it was discombobulated nonsense and abbreviated jargon only the initial notetaker could understand?
Well, they say high school is forever. That feeling of panic still exists in the world of tech project management. With so many moving parts and various teams attached to a project, both internal and external, it’s crucial that a clear timeline is established from the beginning and progress meetings occur regularly to keep all parties on the same page. Otherwise, it can turn into the incomprehensible notebook all over again.
“The key to these projects is precision and simplicity,” Mike Librie, media operations specialist at Bliss Point Media, said. “Everyone who looks at your work needs to know it’s accurate and can understand it with little help needed.”
Built In LA caught up with Libre and Edify’s Kim Fields to uncover the most useful practices involved in overcoming the inevitable challenges associated with project management.
Tell us a bit about the types of projects you manage in your role.
I manage a wide variety of projects in my role, but most fall under two categories: external client-facing and internal. Both have their own unique requirements and challenges. External projects range from assessing potential test networks that fit a client’s demo to managing live campaigns. These usually require multiple moving parts from various stakeholders (us, the client, the networks, etc.) so communication is paramount.
On the other hand, internal projects can be anything from creating guidelines for a new process to organizing data to building a reference sheet for others to utilize. The key to these projects is precision and simplicity – everyone who looks at your work needs to know it’s accurate and can understand it with little help needed.
What’s one critical best practice you follow when it comes to project management, and why?
The MOST critical best practice to follow in project management is communication. It’s important to make sure that everyone involved is tied into each conversation and is well aware of progress on tasks in order to make projects run more effectively and efficiently. Depending on the scope of the work and size of the project, I like to set meetings weekly or a few times a week – even if it’s just for 15 minutes – so that everyone involved can provide updates, concerns, and ask questions to help push the project forward.
Everyone who looks at your work needs to know it’s accurate and can understand it with little help needed.”
What’s one of the biggest challenges you’ve faced managing projects, and how have you overcome it?
One of the biggest challenges I, and many others, face when managing projects is being blocked by external factors. For example, our project team can be working seamlessly internally, but face project delays when an outside source is not responding with a necessary deliverable. To overcome this, it is best practice to set expectations and deadlines at the beginning of the project, so that these outside sources know the exact scope and timeline of elements that are necessary from their end. This can alleviate a lot of the back and forth and confusion around what is expected of each party.
First, tell us a bit about the types of projects you manage in your role.
My team designs, develops, and delivers learning content for our internal employees and external client audiences, which ranges from our channel partner community and end user audiences. Specifically, we create everything from quick guides, videos, e-learning courses, intranet website pages, slide decks and facilitator guides for live training, full blended training programs, and more. Additionally, my team sustains our onboarding program for when new Edifurians join the company, which is a program we also designed and developed. This is an example of a project that oscillates between “project” and “program” because it doesn’t have an official end date. However, we are constantly reevaluating and updating the content and experiences within it. Lastly, we also consult our internal business partners to provide learning expertise on projects that they’re running to achieve some of their business objectives.
So, the content that we create and manage, and our role within each of these projects, varies in size and complexity. This means that each project is different and we are always juggling small to large projects. Projects are always evolving and changing in priority to meet the needs of the business.
What’s one critical best practice you follow when it comes to project management, and why?
Constantly reevaluate. When the project is first scoped, we work really hard to understand all the surrounding project factors, like when the feature is going into testing and when it is officially releasing, who are experts for this project, what are the potential barriers we’ll face, how long should designing/storyboarding take, etc. Yet, something will always come up. The timeline will always change.
So, it’s important to remember that we are an innovative and agile company. This means that initiatives and priorities change, and that means our project timelines and details might need to flex. We are always in response to the business. I see change to the project as an expected expectation, so we always plan to constantly re-evaluate the landscape of the project. This lets us quickly pivot and respond. Yet, it ensures we still actively work to hit our main targets.
We are always prepared to purposefully pivot when needed.’’
What’s one of the biggest challenges you’ve faced managing projects, and how have you overcome it?
There are many factors to take into account, and the business needs are always evolving. So the scoping process is always a balance between what we know now and what we could know in the future. This plan is a very educated estimate and we constantly aim to get closer and closer to the target for each project. So, we always reflect at the end of projects to refine what we could do better when scoping the next project.
Specifically for my team, the success of our projects is based on our level of access to the right people, and these people are usually very busy building products, leading teams, touring to clients, and more. Because we are constantly faced with building timelines and targets based on this variable, we know that scoping is not a “rinse and repeat” step in the process.
Each project will have its own constraints, goals, timelines and targets. This means that we are constantly refining the scoping process. We work from a template that is constantly growing and changing as we learn from each project. We have a list of strategies for overcoming common constraints and barriers that we forecast will pop up. And, most importantly, we go into the process knowing that the project could change after scoping, so we are always prepared to purposefully pivot when needed.
