Achieving Balance - Rigor and Flexibility

If nothing else, being a PM in an agency environment is about achieving balance. I'm just going to skim the surface of this topic in this posting. There are a myriad of competing forces to reconcile along the development continuum in order to find the win/win including:

Reliability & Innovation
Options & Recommendations
Breadth & Depth
Effectiveness & Efficiency
Client Goals & Agency Goals
Collaboration & Autonomy
IM & Email (or picking up the damn phone!)
Revenue & Profit
Branding & Response
Engagement & Accessibility
And the PM classic: Quality, Speed & Price

On the PM side, whether we're talking about employing a service delivery process, using tools & templates or just how one manages communication and relationships, it often comes down to balancing rigor and flexibility.

PM is a robust and mature disciple with a successful history in a number of complex industries. However, an agency environment, is not a construction site, a military base nor a software engineering firm. Many of the PM tactics, tools and tenets that drive success in those environments will choke the life out of an agency. Applied with the right sensibility and professional judgment the methodologies promoted by PMI, Prince2 and the like can absolutely enhance PM and overall agency performance. However, without the appropriate judgment to achieve balance between the rigor supplied by those approaches and the flexibility that must exist in an agency, a clash or a lose/lose is inevitable. Similarly the lack of predictability that comes along with iterative approaches, like Agile is sometimes too nerve-racking for clients or agency stakeholders to bear.

A PM who can effectively depart from a plan to the mutual satisfaction of all is far more valuable than one who can create a 700-line project plan and hold a team hostage with it.

Bend so you don't break.
Bend but don't bend over.

Ad Operations - Our Industry's Connective Tissue

Last week I attended the Leadership Forum run by AdMonsters, the association dedicated to online advertising operations and technology. As is AdMonsters MO for these kinds of things, the Forum was attended by a pretty small and senior group. There was good representation from around the ecosystem, including publishers (e.g CNN, NY & Washington Times, MTV, Gawker, YouTube, Time, Inc.) top tier agencies (e.g. MediaVest, Razorfish, Universal McCann), Networks (e.g. Platform-A, Undertone Networks) as well as some of the usual, appreciated suspects in the 3rd party/sponsor set (e.g. Google/DoubleClick, BurstMedia).

I'm no stranger to the operations world and I was blown away by this Forum.

The deep dive I took re-impressed upon me the importance of operations work - here's the key: These people exist across the entire online marketing and advertising ecosystem (publishers, agencies, networks, 3rd parties). Throughout the day, I kept wishing that C-level executives on all sides could listen to the dialog. Understanding and improving the connective tissue of operations is critical to elevating our entire industry - and key to diminishing the pain in all of our professional lives.

I tuned in and chimed in most when talk turned to process - and there was a lot of it. Themes common to the plight of PM's emerged: need for better communication, collaboration, documentation and tools. The most important area for improvement I heard about was to get the ops folks upstream (themes near and dear to my heart see previous posts: The Best Predictor of Project Outcome - Project Initiation & Project Management Success - Where's the Evidence?!

I know it's scary to peer under the hood and see some of the dirty machinery, but it's a necessity. Support of operations staff by bringing them into the conversation early, so they can participate in defining execution and innovation strategies, rather than being relegated to playing defense, will yield benefits for all.

Do yourself and your teams a favor. Connect with the people in your organizations responsible for operations and learn about and support groups like AdMonsters. In addition to the Leadership Forums, AdMonsters runs conferences for junior team members that are invaluable. The next one in the US, Ad Ops 360°, will be held in New York in May. I hope that AdMonsters gets around to an executive conference or forum soon.