Category: Project Management

How To Manage Projects When You Aren’t A Project Manager

You don’t have to be a full-time project manager to manage marketing projects and, odds are, that if you’re a member of a lean marketing team, it’s something you’ll be called upon to do regularly. If you think about it, you do lots of things that aren’t your core competency. You cook, but you’re not …

How To Identify And Fix Your Marketing Team’s Process Bottlenecks

In a perfect world, Suzy would hand off the draft to Tommy the second she finished editing the last post, and everyone would be perfectly in sync, wasting zero time, with no workflow bottleneck. But humans are not cogs, and marketing is not manufacturing. Project process bottlenecks can lead to missed deadlines, upset customers, and …

How To Design A Great Project Request Process

As busy marketers, we’ve all been there: work requests coming at us from all directions, often without enough information to know where, or even if, to begin, or what the final deliverable should look like. Designing a great project request process provides sanity, with agreed upon process steps that allow managers to: Weed out redundant …

The 5 Biggest Time Wasters Killing Your Marketing Team’s Productivity And How To Fix Them

While conventional wisdom says we all have 24 hours in a day, time wasters greatly reduce our productive hours. In this post, we’ll point out the five biggest productivity killers that plague modern marketing team and offer solutions that help you stay on track and on task. So, what are the 5 biggest time wasters …

Why Marketing Teams Need Better Collaboration And How To Improve It

A company can’t survive very long these days without good marketing team collaboration. And, just like the world we live in, collaboration strategies are dynamic and complex. To help ensure success, marketing leaders should know which roles make up an effective marketing team, avoid collaboration derailers, and leverage marketing collaboration tools, especially project management software. …

How To Audit Your Marketing Team’s Workflows

You’re so busy getting work done that it’s hard to stop and make sure you’re doing it in the most effective way. Yet a workflow review can deliver an amazing ROI when done right. If you never audit workflows, you’ll have no way to spot inefficiencies that could be costing you hundreds of hours of …

10 Best Practices For Planning And Setting Up Successful Projects

Fortune favors the bold, but some creative leaders just start plowing through projects before doing any project set up. No matter how grand your vision or how important the outcomes, without any project planning, you’re doomed. As bestselling self-help author Stephen Covey says, you have to begin with the end in mind. If you want …

How To Successfully Scope A Project

Creating a project scope is a little like getting directions for a trip in Google Maps. In this simile, the address is like the deliverables of a project, the turns are like the project details, and the time estimates are the project requirements. We know to plan for all these things when going on a …

Agile vs. Waterfall: Which Project Management Approach Makes Sense For Your Marketing Team?

There has long been a philosophical tug-of-war in between proponents of agile methodology and those of waterfall methodology as to which is the better approach to managing marketing projects. If you’re a marketer or creative, you may be new to this debate, having given little thought to how your team structures its processes and whether …

Why You Should Judge Project Management Software Vendors On Their Post-Purchase Experience

When evaluating your project management software vendors, it can be easy to forget about the post-purchase experience– aka what happens after you choose the right solution for your needs. Usually, we only think about this part of the process when we’re dealing with conventional retailers and navigating often frustrating shipping, exchange, and return processes. But …