‘Searching for unicorns’: good Digital Project Managers

I liked this description although it seems to suggest that good digital project managers are elusive!

As the role expands with the number of electronic communication channels increasing, the basics of good project management don’t change although the emphasis on what the flavour of the month is does.

What is happening to the role? Well, the number of jobs for digital project managers is increasing as are their salaries. That’s the good news. Defining the specialities within the role that are needed for emerging social media, marketing, e-learning, platforms, and so on, is challenging for those seeking ‘the unicorn’. Many digital project managers have just dealt with an expanding role as it happened not realising that they were specialising. Many and varied channels were just part of the job. This expansion of the role explains why the search for new people often gets divided into Senior, Middleweight and Junior Digital Project Managers. The quote about unicorns comes from Adam Edgerton’s The Successful Digital PM Part 1 (6 May 2013) and is part of a 5 part analysis of the role.

There’s no better way of keeping up-to-date on what’s happening than getting other people to define and collate trends. Now DPM UK 2015 was a recent two day conference just for Digital PMs. Did you miss it? Keep an eye out for next year’s. They don’t give a summary yet although they say it’s coming, but Sarah Clarke gives a succinct account of the conference in the White October blog (6 February 2015). It appears that the current flavour for digital project management emphasises people management. And why not? So the snippet of advice from Sarah learnt from the conference is: ‘We’re all humans trying to do our best. Sometimes we mess up. Admit it, deal with it, move on.’

Luckily for us, someone is finally analysing strategic trends in the UK digital sector. These types of reports are good news for us because they show we are beginning to be taken seriously enough to influence UK performance. The Tech Nation Report looks at cluster growth of technology firms and how they affect a region. Scroll down the page to reach some highlights out of the report. Danny Palmer in Computing, The technology sector is thriving across the UK (6 February 2015), extracts some facts from the report. He cites 1.46 million people working in the digital industries with 74% outside London. There are some conflicting opinions about whether there is a skills shortage in the sector or not in and accompanying this article, but the report itself states one million jobs were advertised last year and by 2020 there will be a 5.4% growth (above average) in the sector.

Seen any unicorns recently?

Digital Project Managers: who wants what? (Part B)

A continuation of last week's look at what's wanted from a Digital Project Manager's Role.

Here's an amalgamation of several wish lists from job descriptions for a Senior post. The promising thing is that there is no question of what a Project Manager is now, whereas there used to be - and the role wasn't described in this way or by job title. Now there's career progression from Junior, Digital Project Manager to Senior Project Manager. Overall we're positive about this trend. But the recruiters seem to ask for the earth in some cases!

Senior Digital Project Manager

Experience: 5 years minimum of web and social media sites. Prince 2 or equivalent, and/or Agile certification

Salary: £30-60k (non London, but UK based) up to £80k London

Role: managing projects from initiation to launch, managing cross-functional teams, clients, and non-technical personnel, get projects out on time, to brief and to budget. Manage new and potential clients, advising on usability/user planning, accessibility, making business cases, online marketing and branding, delivering successful and profitable projects across technologies, extracting and clarifying requirements from clients, assess risks, manage stakeholders.

Knowledge needed: User-focused website design, user experience and user psychology, Digital project planning, Project management tools and techniques, Team/studio management, Relationship building and account management, Managing suppliers, Open-source frameworks, Technical limitations and constraints, Search engine marketing, Social media marketing

Competence in: Taking briefs and listening to what the client is looking to achieve, Writing proposals with recommendations, have an eye for detail but also be creative, producing an outline of the site/app's proposed functionality with costs, Information architecture planning and mapping, Producing wireframes, Facilitating and contributing to discussion around a project's creative treatment, Writing project specifications, Producing realistic project timelines and then managing the project in accordance with that timescale, Setting and controlling project budgets, Managing change requests effectively, presenting outcomes of campaigns with recommendations, quality assurance, managing conflict, have strong presentation and negotiating skills.

Technical abilities: (Some jobs state several front-end and back end skill sets, internet security, and content management systems among others.)

Digital Project Managers: who wants what? (Part A)

Despite the economic vagaries, the job market for Digital Project Managers appears strong. So what skill-sets are companies looking for? Do you measure up? Below we’ve amalgamated what's been asked for under a Digital Project Manager role and next week we look at the Senior role. Quite an eye-opener!

The most whacky but apposite description about a skill was "to be able to talk the technical" or "talk coding and creative". We interpret those as managing cross-functionally. Then we found "produce a clear paper-trail across the project development", we interpret that as use project management tools. And to "get" creative processes (dude?), we interpret as to understand the mind-set of your creatives – the diversity of the cross-functional team? What about the "can-do" approach which also asks for strong control of clients? What about "some kind of coding background" but to manage creatives?

Recruiters expect understanding and experience across all the digital platforms and media types (site builds, micro sites, social media, game builds, ecommerce, web tv, imedia, apps, campaigns, etc.). The job types were sometimes specific to industry sector (publishing, finance, luxury products, retail, medical, fashion, telecoms, broadcasting, etc.), but the expectations of the role were pretty similar.

This is only scratching the surface of the variety and type of role available. The good news is that the wider needs of Project Management for digital are being identified better now than a few years ago. There is more emphasis on managing the stakeholders/clients, as well as the developers; there is recognition of making a business case that suits the clients' business needs; there is more recognition of how complex it is to manage cross-functional teams. Digital sector specific experience becomes crucial. The mix of platforms is growing and the knowledge associated with their development through experience is key. Happy job hunting.

Next week we’ll be looking at the Senior Digital Project Manager’s Role.

Digital Project Manager

Experience: 2-5 years

Salary: £25-35k (non London, but UK based) up to £80k London

Role: managing projects and programmes from concept to delivery, confidently managing internal development teams to deliver briefs, managing internal and external clients/stakeholders, planning digital campaigns, managing various delivery platform development, producing time, cost and scope documentation, managing and allocating resources, manage schedule, budgets, assets, monitor and anticipate risks like scope creep with timely solutions to mitigate them, link objectives of the client to present and future needs, exceed expectations for delivery and performance,

Knowledge needed: understanding of the technical landscape, strategic marketing ideas translated into digital solutions, enthusiasm for technologies and digital communication, brief designers, developers, Art Directors, Information Architects,

Competence in: experience of using appropriate project management tools including Prince 2, Agile, Scrum Master, Basecamp, Merlin, Sifter, MS Project etc., SEO techniques and metrics, content production/copywriting for web, high-volume, quick-turnaround projects, working alongside Account Teams, managing up to 20 projects a day, excellent project management skills, excellent administrative skills, managing change control in projects, meeting budgets.

The expanding concept of an interactive project

In our book, we begin by defining the types of iMedia project that you can come across. This drilled down to projects within projects, and invited you to do an analysis of your organisations' projects over the past year by type and revenue.
The interactive landscape has changed allowing a proliferation of types of project. They can all be subject to the general principles of project management, but it is good to stand back now and then to read the changing landscape. How do we do this?

Well, there are several indicators. Job roles expand to define the diverse skills that are needed for the growing number of projects. There's a snapshot at www.peopleperhour.com which is a site that aims to find you a freelancer based on skills that you need. It's a shame that web design and all related web-type roles fall under other, but on the other hand, the sheer number and categories should stimulate some serious thinking.

It's good to get hold of some statistics about the industry to look at some forecasts. This has always proved problematic because the UK doesn't really support good stats about it - iMedia isn't seen as a cohesive industry yet. However, there is a prediction from the US about interactive graphic designers and the projected increase in numbers of them needed by 2018 – an increase of 13% from 2008! See www.ehow.co.uk

At least this article by Meagan Van Beest (now there’s a name) categorises iMedia designers as Flash Designers, Game Designers, Information Systems Designers, Interactive TV Designers or Web Designers.

Finally, to wake you up with lateral thinking, those off-the-wall projects happening now may well shape whole sections of the interactive market in the not too distant future. There's a great toe-dipping experience at Goldsmith's College London explained at Creative Choices UK about the use of smart interactive technologies affecting theatre, medicine, and textile sectors.
See www.creative-choices.co.uk