Use It or Lose It!

It's that time of year - where that is a variable for things like: "holiday", "peace", "joy", "depression", etc. For agency and client staff, it's Use-It-or-Lose-It (UIoLI) time. By UIoLI I'm referring both to:

• clients' end-of-the year rush to spend their budgets in order to squeeze out a last bit of performance or to justify next year's budget.
• vacation days & corporate policies for roll-over (or not as the case may be).

 These two UIoLI events come to a nasty head at the end of year. To a lesser extent, summer time with its holidays and summer Fridays, also has similar issues.
How can a dedicated agency person, leave her client, or for that matter, her team in the lurch during these critical times of year? This conundrum becomes even more complex because people both have long-standing plans, or faced with UIoLI, slap together last-minute trips. To turn up the temperature a few more degrees, on the client-side the same thing is happening, making the end of the year pretty much the sloppiest, most pressured, time of the year.

It only took me a few cycles of being one of the few saps (dedicated employees?) still in the office at 11pm on 12/23 and 7/3 to begin managing my and my team's vacation schedules. One approach I've taken rounding the Q3 corner, when my team wasn't burning their vacation days fast enough was to implement Winter Fridays, where they could at least enjoy some additional 3-day weekends. If someone has two weeks of unused vacation coming onto the 4th quarter, they can pretty much work it out so that they can have 4-day weeks for the rest of the year. Another approach was to encourage them to come in late or leave early. Of course, the "good" ones (you guys know who you are) would still manage to put in over 50+ hours, even in those shortened weeks. At least they got some down-time that they otherwise would not have had.

Their are many benefits to encouraging (or as some of the business literature suggests, "forcing") your team to take time off, including: higher retention rates and increased morale to learning time-management skills and driving productivity. The Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Business Week and many others have written extensively about these issues.

So, if you're not fortunate enough to live in a state like California, where vacation days are considered earned wages that roll-over from year to year, take the time you deserve. Trust me, you and everyone around you will be better off than if you give them back to the man.

Advertising Educational Foundation (AEF) - Project Managers' Friend and Foe

I was surfing the ad agency advocate sites and came across the Advertising Educational Foundation (AEF), which initially drew my ire. When I came across a section of well-articulated advice from industry veteran, Bruce Kelley, Vice Chairman, The Martin Agency, my temperature came down a few notches.

Guess what position isn't even mentioned among those detailed by the AEF on their Careers in Advertising page. Not surprisingly, Project Management doesn't make the list among: Account Management, Account Planning, Creative, Media, Market Research -not even a mention of Project Management in their general bucket of Interactive Marketing. Not that I expected much from an organization with such traditional roots. However, one might expect more from a board that includes the forward-thinking, power executive, Shelly Lazarus, Chairman and CEO of Ogilvy and Barry Wacksman, EVP & Chief Growth Officer R/GA, a stand-up guy who is as progressive as they come.

I know that my ire about Project Management being a missing link is a variation on the theme introduced in my December 8 post on Account Management / Project Management partnership. But their crime of omission bears repeating - especially from an organization that misses so big as it seeks to enrich understanding, which is expressed in their Mission Statement: ". . .the advertising industry's provider and distributor of educational content to enrich the understanding of advertising and its role in culture, society and the economy."

I'm not feeling too terribly negative today, so I offer this very strong contribution from the AEF site as well: Bruce Kelley, Vice Chairman, The Martin Agency is arguably part of the old guard agency establishment. However, the guy has a lot of experience and you'd be a fool not to at least listen. Although his advice is offered for Account Managers (I'll forgive his omission in this context), the section he authored on the AEF Web site, Memos for Account Management, is fine reading, especially for Project Managers. If this kind of thinking permeated the entire marketing ecosystem of agencies, publishers and third parties, the world would be a more orderly place - right, that's what we project managers are after? Among the topics he covers are: How to Push Back, How to be Proactive, Handling Crisis and How to Think Defensively.

One would think that just having these topics up for discussion among colleagues in an agency has got to foster a productive working environment that is marked by better collaboration internally and with clients. Although, you never know - the distance between memos, theory and on the ground experience can be vast. Would love to hear from any of you Martin alum or clients.