Project Management and Conflict

One of Project Managers' most important roles is to drive continual improvement. In a multi-agenda, multi-stakeholder environment this pretty much means that conflict is inevitable. We're all familiar with the full range of conflict from the healthy kind, which results in the aforementioned improvement to the kind that comes from butting heads with those whose personal agenda and greater good aren't fully balanced.

A key to success for a PM in an agency environment is getting good at working through conflicts in a way that elevates the ecosystem. It's a refined skill, which on the weak side results in you caving on something that needs to be driven and on the other side has too strident an approach, which generates disproportionate resistance. In addition, to a lack of progress, too much of either approach will leave you ping-ponging between them and getting nowhere while building a reputation that you'll have to shake.

I followed an interesting string on the topics of conflict and leadership, which led from:

• Jessica Stillman's Entry-Level Rebel blog post: Tim Ferris: Don't Be Afraid to Piss People Off on BNET - Jessica is a great amplifier of sage advice from blogs, books and presentations.
  
  to
  
  
• Tim's Ferris's blog post: The Benefits of Pissing People Off, in which he advises that, "Doing anything remotely interesting will bring criticism. Attempting to do anything large-scale and interesting will bring armies of detractors and saboteurs. This is fine – if you are willing to take the heat."
  
  and finally to
  
  
• Colin Powell's Leadership Primer on Slidshare, in which, among other things, he advises that, "Ironically, by procrastinating on the difficult choices, by trying not to get anyone mad . . . you'll simply ensure that the only people you'll wind up angering are the most creative and productive people in the organization"
  
  

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.

Project Management Recognition - Getting the Love (and more) that PM's Deserve

For the purposes of this post, let's consider Project Manager and Producer roles the same thing. There is certainly no clear distinction in our industry - more on this in a future post.

Trolling around the Droga5 website, in the "Stuff" section. I found, "I Want to Marry a Producer" by Ted Royer, Droga5's Executive Creative Director. It's one of the funniest, most endearing (and somewhat creepy) things I've read recently. He discusses various intra-agency marital options: account person, client, even another creative but dismisses them all for a producer. I don't know Ted personally (not entirely sure I'd like to - I certainly wouldn't want to get too close) but he has a body of work that puts him in high-regard in the industry and, in my book, his romantic side adds to his rep.

I always appreciate it when PM's and Producers are recognized for the important roles they play. Unfortunately, recognition of PM contributions isn't the norm. If you haven't read my post Project Management Success - Where's the Evidence?!, which features a clip of Dustin Hoffman, playing Stanley Motts, the self-absorbed producer in Wag the Dog, give it a try. Hoffman delivers a hilarious set of tirades about producers and recognition.

An Agency's Ability to Deliver - People Are Talking

Industry talk is tantalizing. Externally, aided in great part by the plethora of awards, trade pubs and blogs, buzz tends to center around account-wins, creativity, and to a lesser extent, results. Published industry evaluation reports (e.g. AdWeek's Digital Agency Report Card, Forrester's Wave Studies) evaluate similar things, but an agency's ability to execute efficiently is not considered. However, within the industry, peer-to-peer at the bar (like when one PM asks another about a shop she used to work at), an agency's working environment, and its ability to deliver, are main topics.

I've had the opportunity to get out and about to various industry events and conferences recently. Good form prevents me from listing details of what I've overheard. I will say that I was amazed at the consistency of buzz about certain agencies from one event to another and how well it aligned with the trash-talk I've heard inside of various agencies. The lack of understanding by some non-creative agency parties about the challenges of managing clients and creative/tech deliverables was striking as well.

An agency's reputation is important to maintain. Here are just a few areas where buzz comes into play.

• Hiring - In the current economic environment, agencies that are hiring have the upper hand. However, the best talent out there, especially those that have a stable gig, will still be applying even more scrutiny when considering whether or not to join a new shop.
  
  
• Business Referrals - Media companies often influence clients' choices of what creative agencies to work with or, believe me, to stop working with.
  
  
• Headhunters & Agency Recruiting Personnel- These guys hear it all. They get a regular insider's tour of agencies from the slew of talent they interact with. I've begged one of my long-term headhunter friends to write a book, I, and I'm sure others, would love to read it.
  
  
• Third-Party & Publisher Preference - Guess which agencies 3rd party vendors like PointRoll, EyeBlaster and EyeWonder are going to partner with and feature in their case studies for their newest, high-functioning units? Publishers are well aware of which agencies deliver on time, and which deliver heartache.
  
  
• Who's Got Your Back? - When the trash talk about your agency starts flying (usually behind your back), you want/need someone who knows your agency's and your work to chime in and support you.
  

I don't need to tell you that clients care very much about an agency's ability to deliver. Any agency evaluation report card, or feedback given by a client (especially those leading up to or following an account being put into review) consider agency efficiency and reliability very heavily.

PM's main mission is to ensure high-quality output that is delivered on-time, on-budget and on-spec. It's incumbent on you to not only execute on this and to form positive relationships with those who share the ecosystem with you. Obviously, this will help improve your ability to deliver together, but it will also improve your company's and your own reputation and your ability to thrive. I assure you, you will need it someday. As the Oracle of Omaha suggests:

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”

- Warren Buffet

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.

Media and Creative: Live together or die together.

Stakes are higher now than ever for success - actually, high stakes for our survival are more like it. The level of dysfunction between agencies (and the various parties within), clients and publishers continues to elevate as campaigns gain complexity and economic pressure increases. To focus a bit: collaboration between media and creative teams, whether from the same or different agencies, has got to improve.

Gunther Sonnerfeld, in his March 13, iMedia Connection piece, Why Media and Creative Need to Cross the Aisle, addresses the topic to a degree, but veers into the high-ground of " . . . when innovation is the key to success." As PM's we are painfully aware: great thinking isn't worth the PPT it's printed on if you can't execute.

It never ceases to amaze me how seasoned, high-performing industry veterans, who know, work with and respect each other, will claim that the other's agency/team is nightmare to partner with. All day, everyday very smart people across the industry, including very senior talent, are mired in the collateral damage of poor partnerships.

Along the campaign development continuum, from Initiation to Deployment & Diagnosis, there are key activities and deliverables that require media/creative alignment in order to get projects out on-time, on-budget, on-spec - let alone reaching Sonnerfeld's ideal of innovation or, even high-quality. Below are some key milestones, grouped by project phase. Let's play a little game: See how many you recognize as dys-integration pain-points from your past experience (and likely, your future ones):

INITIATION PHASE

• Client Request:
  Always hear about this in time?
  
  
• Brief (Media, Creative, Project ):
  Integrated?
  

DEFINITION PHASE

• Strategic Recommendation:
  Always considers both medium and message?
  
  
• User Experience or Design & Channel Roles:
  Full customer journey considered?
  
  
• Measures of Success:
  Ever see CTR driving a branding campaign or humor/animation that impedes reaching desired response objectives?
  

DESIGN PHASE

• Media Consideration Set:
  Creative folks have an opinion on where/when ads should run?
  
  
• Conceptual Designs & Prototypes:
  Media folks have any thoughts on whether units will work or what the competition has already done?
  

DEVELOPMENT PHASE

• Specifications:
  Red Meat! Don't even know where to begin on this one!
  
  
• Main Ad Units:
  Wish you'd seen/shown to your partners before client buried you?
  
  
• Unique Units, Odd Sizes & Resizes:
  Too many / too few? LCD issues? Show client all units or assume because client approved the main ones, the others are approved?

DEPLOYMENT PHASE

• Traffic:
  Ever resent a site,media or creative partner for caving and saying they can turn around in 1 day?
  
  
• QA:
  Listed after Traffic intentionally. Ever wish you checked yourself, before trafficking?

DIAGNOSIS PHASE

• See comments re: Measures of Success in Definition Phase section above:
  How good are you at arguing both pro and con DL study results? Have enough time / budget / data to optimize creative?

There are a myriad of best-practices to be applied to address issues across this broad a spectrum. They all include better, more timely communication between media and creative teams / agencies. As far as serving the client, we only succeed together. In terms of CYA, if your partner blows up, the shrapnel could be headed your way.

The Best Predictor of Project Outcome - Project Initiation

I have developed and deployed numerous tools, techniques and templates that assist in completing high-quality projects on-time, on-budget and on-spec. However, the best aides in the world are of little use, without a framework or a way of thinking that guides their use.

The central idea of the framework that I advocate is that up-stream investments pay down-stream dividends. If you don't start right, it's difficult to finish that way. Simple idea, yes, but in the common rush to complete and succeed in an agency, groups of highly intelligent professionals (i.e. the team) frequently devolve into a 3-ring circus. "Ready, Fire, Aim" is a prevalent and unfortunate reality of day-to-day agency life.
Up-stream activities, such as information gathering, synthesis and dissemination are the preventive medicine that keeps agencies healthy.

COURSE-SETTING to avoid COURSE-CORRECTING!

Now, one doesn't want to get carried away. This orientation should not be misconstrued as a recommendation that the end-state should, or even can be, known at the outset of a complex engagement. In fact, the very value that project managers bring to the table - thoughtfulness about process, planning and up-stream focus, can choke the life out of the place if applied rigidly. There is value to be lifted and applied from both waterfall (stringent) and agile (flexible) methodologies.

Perhaps a bit overstated in terms of the uselessness placed on plans, this quote frames the issue well:

In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Ike realized that the very act of planning and the frame of mind that it creates, lays the groundwork for intelligently dealing with challenges.

Do yourself and your teams a favor and apply effort up front. The finest minds in an agency are a valuable resource to be used wisely. Time spent in the early phases of a project is a far more effective than time spent scrambling to find and apply resources hours before a deadline.