You have heard of this thing, this project management business, yes? Chances are, if you’ve worked independently (ie directly with the client) then even if you weren’t knowingly wearing the hat, you were providing it as a service. In laymen’s, it is the art of coordinating chaos, but a more specific and meaty definition might be the process and activity of organizing, planning and motivating various resources towards specific goals.

Many times on a project, especially in the E+C lane, our clients will be hesitant to allow us to bring in a third resource, whose only real task seems to be staying on top of the email threads. Surely this job can’t be so important and game-changing crucial that we need one person to focus on just that, right?

WRONG.

The Project Manager (PM) is the brain of a project, they are part of the process from the first planning discussions to the final rounds of QA and deliverable prep. Thinking they are unnecessary, superfluous bits of agency fluff demonstrates lack of understanding of the healthy project life cycle.

I can’t say much about projects that had a solid PM who knew their racket, those are less than memorable as they tend to move quickly and resolve peacefully. The ones that stand out in my memory are the ones where the PM was not up to the task of running several resources against a deadline, or did not know how to handle client expectations and communications.

Primer

At the beginning of a project, there should be a clear goal in mind, ie “We are going to _____ as a team and get it done.” Let’s say the project in mind is getting a house painted, you need to put together a crew of painters, and each one probably has a secondary role they can perform on the team (driver, designated roller cleaner, gopherwork). The house will take three days to paint, based on square footage per painter per hour (72 hours total for 3 workers).

You get commitments from three painters who are also able to play the specific sub-roles. There is another support person who is able to run things to and from the job site as needed. You line up windows when everyone will be available, and give the homeowner choices as to the week they want the work done. They make their selection, and the project is a go.

Congratulations, you are running project management.

The sexy saga continues as you do a last-minute confirm with all parties, probably within a day or two of official kick-off. In the unlikely event of a worker being unavailable, you have backups that you can bring in. As each day rounds out, you do a check-in with all parties to make sure that goals are being met and any open concerns have been addressed.

At the end of the third day, you may drop in to make sure the house is completely painted, and on-schedule. If there is touch-up work, maybe you were smart enough to include that as a window for day 4 in preliminary planning for the site, and the workers are all clear on a flat rate for the day following three days of per-hour work for specific rates and tasks.

You hold the line of communication with the client to make sure they’re feeling good about the work, the compensation conversation has happened, you address any issues they have had in the project. If there was tension between painters on the team, you get to the bottom of those to figure out who is good to work with who on future projects.

If you really believe in team spirit, you’ll pull everybody together for a post mortem lunch / drink to discuss what worked and what didn’t on the project, open-forum style. Maybe one of the painters has an idea to make things run faster or more effectively, and since on-the-job isn’t always the best place to break out a new method, it’s good to give the team this space to discuss different ideas.

Final Coat

Be it painting houses or building websites, the same rules apply. The Project Manager is the organizing principle that pulls the team, tasks and timeline together. Without a strong brain in the driver’s seat, you’ll find yourself in some fairly common and painful shitshows:

• Deadlines and client communication cycles fall apart, so review notes are jumbled with initial production.
• Project is not scoped properly, talent not sufficient for needs, this is discovered mid-stream with client on the line.
• Client believes process to be continuous and iterative, rather than understanding this is a mapped path to a defined solution.
• Deliverables not clearly defined at project inception, so last minute over-work is required to smooth situation.
• Everyone’s favorite: paydays getting tricky and sticky.

A good manager will make sure the whole process runs smoothly for all involved, no surprises, no bumps. Of course the real world will present weather conditions and choppy waters, a good manager also knows how to balance those ideals against the gritty details in the wild.

Also, to keep it 100 with all of my freelancers at the table, you can shmooze all you want to with the suits and starched collars at an agency, you want to be in solid and tight with the PM’s they have in-house. No shmoozing there, they are a breed too dedicated to their deadlines and too fluent in the language of bullshit. But, if you consistently show solid and dependable work, who do you think they will turn to when they need solid work done dependably?