The Project Management Skills That Keep Creatives On Track

Transcript


Today’s creative agencies need to move rapidly, whether they’re executing complex campaigns, capitalizing on pop culture moments or averting a crisis. Harnessing the power of project management can channel that urgency and inspiration toward strong execution and buzz-worthy results. Which project management skills help teams turn their ideas into reality? What domain expertise does a project manager need to thrive in a creative environment? We’ll discuss with Matt Austin, PMP, VP of project management at Jellyfish in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, and Jill Lyons, SVP of creative operations at Maximum Effort in Chicago.


STEVE HENDERSHOT 
In today’s hyperconnected world, trends can evaporate in the blink of an eye. And that can drive a sense of urgency for creative agencies. Whether their ideas seize on pop culture moments or involve complex campaigns, teams must bring buzz-worthy concepts to life amid need-it-now deadlines and other constraints. Today we’ll look at how project management skills can help creative teams dazzle and thrive. 

In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified®, we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.

This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.

Teams at creative agencies generate much of the media we interact with every day—from TV and radio commercials to influencer campaigns on TikTok to digital billboards in city centers to, well, even podcasts. Whatever they’re working on, these teams channel creativity into projects.

Of course, agency teams must navigate many of the same challenges that teams in other industries face. There are tight timelines and budgets, the need to manage the expectations of multiple stakeholders and wrangling collaborators from a range of disciplines. That means project management is essential to channeling inspiration into results.

Today we’ll learn how project leaders at two creative agencies set their teams up for success. But before we go to that conversation—if you like Projectified, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Your feedback helps us keep making this show. 

Okay, now to the discussion. We chatted with Matt Austin, the VP of project management at marketing company Jellyfish, as well as Jill Lyons, SVP of creative operations at Maximum Effort, the agency behind films, TV series and advertisements involving a Hollywood star you might know—Ryan Reynolds. Matt is in Baltimore, Maryland in the United States, while Jill is in Chicago.

Their firms approach project leadership differently. At Jellyfish, there’s a central project management function that supports teams across the agency, while at Maximum Effort, project leadership isn’t a distinct function but is baked into each team and project. But there’s a common thread: Both ensure that agency projects deliver results—and creative genius—for clients, on time and on budget.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

The role of project management at creative agencies

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Jill and Matt, thanks for joining us. Let’s start our discussion with project management’s role within a creative agency. How does project management, or project management skills, factor into how your teams approach their work? 

MATT AUSTIN
At Jellyfish, we’re a digital partner for global brands. We sit somewhere in between a more traditional digital agency and a consulting operation. The range of services that we provide is pretty broad and varied, so we deploy staff from our PMO (project management office) to make sure that we’re delivering effectively for our clients when we’ve got large, bespoke engagements that bring a mix of these capabilities to bear. And we view our project management team as a competitive advantage for Jellyfish.

Before I came to Jellyfish, I worked in ad tech, healthcare, IT, fintech and had a long stint as a consultant implementing professional services and software platforms for FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration). And in those arenas, I needed to develop specialized domain knowledge, but the key to my success was my project management skill set. So I’m a big believer in project management in general. Project management, I think, is an important function in any organization where you’re managing complex work under tight deadlines. I think there are important considerations that come into play when you’re working in a creative environment. You absolutely need domain expertise to be effective in that arena, but I don’t think the way that project management provides value in creative is significantly different than in those other environments, right? You’re defining scope by making sure the team is getting a detailed brief. You’re overseeing quality control, risk and change management. I think those are all of value for creative teams.

JILL LYONS
Yeah, Matt, I couldn’t agree more. It’s kind of like playing very traditional basketball versus, like, street ball or the Harlem Globetrotters, right? You still have to have your fundamentals, and project management—you said it best—taking that complex work and turning it into action. I always like to say and work very closely with some of the most creative people on the planet, that ideas are just ideas until they get made. Project management helps bring those ideas to life and make sure that we’re moving the needle toward completion. There are functional skills that are critical to any operation—whether you’re making a product or if you’re making a creative output—you have to start with nothing to get to something. Project management is kind of the kick in the pants that every idea needs to make sure that it gets birthed out into the world, right?

MATT AUSTIN 
I like that. The kick in the pants.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
That’s great. Everything you just said makes perfect sense, and yet in some people’s minds, there’s an inevitable tension between creativity and project management. This sense of, you can’t impose too much deadline pressure or technical constraint because it will short-circuit the creative process. What’s a way to bridge that gap?

JILL LYONS 
At Max Effort, our mission is to bring people together in fun, smart and unexpected ways, and a lot of ways that that comes out means that we really operate more like a newsroom or a triage. We have really flexible philosophies around these traditional approaches to project and program management. And I think, increasingly so in 2024, flexibility is what everybody needs, because we’re constantly dealing with deadlines changing, sentiment changing, the project evolving. And the project manager truly has to have these communication and EQ (emotional quotient) skills to say, “Oh, okay, this is where we were yesterday, but today we’re here. How are we pivoting, changing? Who am I assembling, and how are we moving, again, the needle forward toward the goal of delivery?” That has to be flexible, I think, in today’s work environment.

MATT AUSTIN
I think that’s a really great point, Jill. You start with a plan, but that plan is going to have to change. You’re going to have to make adjustments on the fly. That’s where I see a lot of value in project management in these types of arenas. When you have to adjust, you want somebody that is focused on that change management, otherwise you’re asking people that are supposed to be focused on the creative and the creative process, and you’re pulling them out of that process to try and manage the workflow. And so I think that that is where project management really fits in when you’re talking about creative, as opposed to any other kind of arena where you get that value.

The project management skills and domain expertise that help creative teams thrive

STEVE HENDERSHOT
So what project management expertise do creative professionals need to keep their own projects on track? And also, if you’re a project manager embedded on a creative team and trying to add some of this structure, what domain expertise do you need, and how does that look different than if you were in some other industry?

JILL LYONS
I think you have to know your audience when you’re a project manager. You can’t come into a highly creative organization with a Gantt chart and, “Come hell or high water, the project is getting done on this budget.” You have to have a degree of flexibility, and understand that the creative process is an iterative one, right? That’s going to continue to evolve and change, like Matt was saying.

And then to answer your first question of what kind of project management skills do creatives need to have, increasingly, right? The entire industry has changed so rapidly, much in thanks to the advent of so many technologies, the fact that people are working remote and asynchronous. In a lot of ways, you’ve got to be able to manage your ideas to completion. And so it’s not enough to come up with, in the big kind of Mad Men days of—and I’ll just speak from advertising—here’s the great idea, and now there’s a team of people who are going to help make it happen. You have to be involved in that process, and you have to be a champion of your work and a champion of getting the idea made. So you can’t pitch something to a client that’s not makeable. And when I say not makeable, that could be time, that could be budget, that could be talent related. You really have to look at the ecosystem. And I really feel like strong creatives know that a good project manager or an ops person is worth their weight in gold. And then the process becomes, how do those two work together? It’s a team sport.

MATT AUSTIN
Yeah, I think you hit on a couple of key things there. Managing creativity is a balancing act, and some of the key ways that project managers bring value to an organization—promoting efficiency, managing risk—those concepts can be anathema to some creatives, right? If a PM (project manager) comes in on a creative project, and they’re only focused on that efficiency, there’s a real risk of stifling that creative process and losing buy-in from that team. And going away from that teamwork that you talked about, Jill. I’m a proponent of the servant leadership model, so I believe that it’s always important to think about project management in terms of, what does it bring to the team? And in a creative environment, I think that an emphasis needs to be on enabling creative effectiveness. A good PM can protect the team from distractions. And some of the foundational things that a good PM does—like making sure we’re getting good, clear briefs, that we’re managing the client stakeholders effectively or that we’re facilitating good feedback on the work that’s in progress—I think those are great ways to make sure that we’re building innovative creative.

And then the skills that can specifically benefit the team, I think when we talk about project management, a lot of people assume that we’re talking about the centralized function, where you’ve got a project manager that is fulfilling all of the functions that are necessary for a project to run effectively. When an organization has the resources to take that approach, I think that it’s the simplest and the most efficient way to deliver, but that decentralized organization is a viable alternative. The reality in creative environments, especially at small shops, is that you’re operating that way, right? And then in those scenarios, PM skills are going to directly benefit the creatives that make up the team because they’re going to be the ones responsible for those oversight and coordination functions. I’m more familiar with that centralized modem where you’ve got the designated PM. And in that scenario, I think it’s the communication skills, time management, team building—those are the things that help the team run more effectively, surface challenges back to the PM and understand how to prioritize their own work.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Let’s move to planning a creative project. You could map out your project with predictive or agile approaches—two-week sprints and iterating could seem like a good fit for these projects. But in some ways, it doesn’t always work. Say you fly Ryan Reynolds out to a polar ice cap to film a two-minute spot. You may have iterated on the script, but the shoot is the shoot. How do you handle that? Because some things are elastic, but other elements become fixed as you move along the timeline.

JILL LYONS
It’s the collective skill of the team, right? And I think when you look at the context surrounding the project, this is where, again, I’ll stress that EQ, that emotional intelligence, is so critical for anyone driving a project forward to say, “Okay, well, wait a minute. What do I have on the table?” And Matt, you were talking about your experience. I kind of come from the opposite where I started as a producer in creative, a writer and producer, and kind of moved into an operations role where I managed the PMO at a very large organization in advertising. And now I’ve kind of come full circle back into this intersection between media, television and film, and advertising. That EQ skill of understanding the team dynamic and understanding the task at hand with the creative, I find that I personally kind of zigzag between waterfall, scrum, agile—sometimes many times a day within the same project.

I know this might sound kind of nerdy and crazy, but you can have a mini waterfall within an agile process, right? So you could do a two-week sprint, but have a very linear sub-project within that. It really kind of is so individualistic depending on what the project is, what the task at hand is, to be done. This is where the word intention comes up for me a lot. What are we trying to do? What does “done” look like, and how are we making sure that as kind of the quarterback or project manager, the person who’s charged with moving the ball forward, we are making sure that everyone is super aligned on that goal? Because if the goal is to get the project done on time and on budget—which it always is, right—the goal might also be to have the highest creative output possible, and then that might change the time, and that might change the budget. But I always tell clients projects are never not on time and not on budget, because I’ve communicated that to you. In a perfect, ideal world, right? And so, again, that communication and just really keeping the team focused on what the goal is is so, so critical.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Have you ever had a client say, “We don’t care how much it costs or how long it takes, just make it the most awesome?”

JILL LYONS
No, no, no. I wish that that would happen.

MATT AUSTIN 
That’s a lovely brief.

JILL LYONS
Yeah, exactly, that sounds like a dream brief. No, of course. I mean, listen, everyone’s budgets are tight. Everyone’s time is tight. I was in-house with a brand, a Fortune 100 brand, and you really understand the dynamics of what marketers are up against. There are board meetings. The boss’s boss has to approve things. There are budgets that are accounted for a year before. It’s like, how do you build understanding of what is still kind of a very rigid system on the brand and marketing side? I’m using “clients”—you can’t see me, but I’m using air quotes—at Max Effort, we talk about having partners, not clients, because of that reason, right? We are really in collaboration, and the dialogue has to be there. The more that you understand why the timeline is the timeline and why the budget is the budget, the more that you can do with that and use that as another value input, but not the end-all be-all. “Well, wait a minute. Why is the timeline December 1st? Oh, because you have to traffic something for December 15th.” Well, whoever’s trafficking the spot might say that it’s on December 15th, that they need 15 business days, but we also know that that’s maybe not the case. So maybe we can push it with a little communication to whoever’s trafficking the spot, right? That’s just kind of an example. But again, if you get to the intention and the why behind some of these rules—whether they’re timelines, deadlines, whatever—sometimes it can help move the needle toward a better product.

MATT AUSTIN
You said that so perfectly. It’s, how do you create space for good work amidst all of those constraints? That’s the challenge, is finding that box that can kind of be protected from that other noise. And I think that’s part of the role of the project management team.

JILL LYONS 
One hundred percent.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
That ties into earlier when we talked about domain expertise in the creative industry—knowing the actual levers and how much play there is with stakeholders or campaign deadlines and so forth. There might be more wiggle room than you think.

MATT AUSTIN
One hundred percent. Understanding what are the things that sit behind that, being able to anticipate as you move through that creative workflow. What are the things downstream that we need to be thinking about so they don’t come up and surprise us? If your project manager or your integrated producer—whatever you’re calling it on the team—doesn’t have that ability, then there’s not as much value that can be provided there. So it’s that combination of core project management skill set with the understanding of the domain that you’re in. In this case, it’s that creative domain and how the production process comes together.

JILL LYONS
It’s so wildly different. You could be producing a direct mail campaign or a Super Bowl spot. There’s a wide gamut of creativity. Matt, what I think is so strong about what you said is, like, that base skill set can be learned, can be taught. It’s what PMI does best, right, is give you those skill sets, and then you take that and you say, “Okay, well, where’s my interest? And how do I layer that on to how I like to work, in what environment I like to work, who I like to work with, and what I kind of care about pushing out into the world?” And I think that’s what’s so cool about just the practice and the role of project management in any organization.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
That was great. Now, let’s talk about some examples. Can you share a project from your career where project management or project management skills played a heroic role in bringing a creative campaign or asset to life?

MATT AUSTIN
Jellyfish was delivering a localization and transcreation project for a large technology client. The client was conducting a global rollout of several new products simultaneously, and all the launch dates were set well in advance. They had business drivers that couldn’t be moved, and so the object of the project was to take all of that content for this product rollout from the native language and culture, and adapt it for every language in the market that this product was going to be sold in. Transcreation is more than simple translations. It’s about recreating content in a way that captures the original intent. There’s this subtle art at play and a significant amount of creative freedom for the person that’s doing the transcreation. In many ways, it’s similar to the creative process of translating a short story or a piece of poetry.

So on this engagement, project management was really important from the start. As we kicked off the project, there were kind of two things that the PM did that I think really supported the creative process. The first was being able to understand the process and kind of see where it’s going. The PM, the first thing they did, they were tailoring the production workflows. They’re these really complex projects with a lot of moving pieces. We were localizing content for 30 plus markets, and each of them had to be interpreted a little bit differently. So we start with these templatized sets of workflows, but in this particular project was orders of magnitude larger and more complex than a standard project. So the PM needed to tailor all these workflows to account for the complexity of the work and this compressed timeline.

They also needed to go through at the beginning and take a look at all this original content and identify areas where there might be especially challenging pieces of transcreative for the creatives. And so this risk identification and tailoring [are] two fundamental skills that we want to instill in our team. And in this instance, the lead PM on the project did both of them absolutely brilliantly. And at the end of the day, the result was that the creatives were able to spend the maximum amount of time on the most important pieces of the creative work. They didn’t have to diffuse their focus. The PM had kind of zeroed them in on what was really important.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Yeah, that’s great. I feel like in every localization transcreation project, risk is a factor as well as the art of doing it well. Great example. Jill, how about you?

JILL LYONS
My example comes from a little movie that we put out called Deadpool & Wolverine just recently. You might have heard of it. Hopefully you saw it. It’s great.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
I really wanted that example to be happening. I’m really glad it is. Thank you.

JILL LYONS 
Listen, I mean, it was a Herculean effort, and I just have to call and shout out our entire production team and the entire marketing team at Disney. And we were just a well-oiled machine of daily standups and Slack channels and checks and balances and charts and moving the needle forward. Again, I’ve said that many times today, but I always think about, “Okay, did we make progress on our goal of what we said we were going to do yesterday? Are we doing it today?” And that’s always the marker. With so many moving parts, over a dozen brands that were participating and kind of on-the-fly iteration of creative development as we got closer and closer to launch, I just have to call out, again, the EQ skills of communication and tethering and making sure that this corner of the universe is talking to that corner of the universe. “Who needs to talk to who today? And what do we need to do to move this project forward?” And that requires a special skill to make sure you get the right people in the room, or more likely today in 2024, on the right Zoom in the right place, right? You can’t have a 100-person Zoom every day. But there were hundreds of people who worked on this film and the marketing of this film. The discernment to understand who needed to know what information and when, I just have to really shout out the team for pulling it off, and to great success.

MATT AUSTIN
Thank you for letting me go first there, Jill. I was worried this entire time about following the Ryan Reynolds example. I knew it was going to happen somewhere. I’m glad I didn’t have to follow it.

JILL LYONS
Oh my gosh. You know what? All project management wins are the same. It’s just on a different scale.

Embracing flexibility and adaptability in creative project life cycles

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Jill, you mentioned there are a lot of moving pieces and in-the-moment iterations during creative development. How do skills like flexibility and adaptability come into play, especially given the quick turnaround of today’s creative projects?

JILL LYONS 
Well, again, I’ll just go back to the idea that we behave more like a newsroom or a triage, and it’s because we don’t believe that ads age well, and we don’t necessarily think that every ad is a great, timeless ad, right? Some are, hands down. Susan Credle said a really great ad is timely and timeless, and I do believe that. And I also believe that in the attention currency that we trade in, timeliness is more important than timelessness. And so you have to just really think on your feet. What we’re trying to do is change the narrative of how creative ideas and moments can get birthed out into the ecosystem. It doesn’t have to be on a six-month timeline and project plan and focus group testing before it goes out into the world and all of this stuff. It can just be for a moment. And so that’s really kind of the evolution that we’ve tried to take at Maximum Effort, with really letting brands and moments and culture pieces and films and TV, like, play in the moment.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
What about when a team member brings a new idea to the table, or the wheels just fall off and everything is changing? 

JILL LYONS 
I mean, Matt said it best here. It’s a team sport. The answer’s never no with project management. “Oh, can we do this?” And the answer’s not no. It’s like, “Huh, okay. Let’s think about A, B and C,” right? And the answer, ultimately, might be, “No, we decided to not do that.” But it’s a team sport. You [have] got to understand [that], and that comes from a high relational trust and bond with your team, to know that you might not know where you’re going but you know you’re going together.

MATT AUSTIN
You hit on a good point there. I think it’s pretty rare when a project goes according to plan, and I think that’s where a really good PM can provide value.

JILL LYONS 
I read recently in an org design book that there’s two types of leaders—there are visionary leaders, and then there are leaders who are good in a crisis. And I think you need both in any creative project. You’ve got to have the vision, and then you’ve got to have somebody when, like, the wheels fall off. And I think the PMs are like, “We’re good-in-a-crisis people.” We are the crisis people. Matt, you said earlier you’re anticipating the problem that’s coming so that you can kind of circumvent it before it even comes up, which is a very visionary point to be in, to say, “Hey, I see this curveball coming down the road. How do we get ahead of it?” And I think any project needs both.

MATT AUSTIN 
Yes, project management I think is definitely, “We are the crisis management people.” And I think that that is the first and most common thing when we think about the value that PM can provide to an organization. But I think, also, that replanning should also be a regular part of that risk management process, even if you haven’t run into trouble. If you’re only replanning when you’ve got that crisis, you’re missing opportunities to improve. “Have we learned anything during the project that we can use immediately to work more effectively or to increase client satisfaction?” I think that’s a way that you can provide value outside of just being able to manage those crises and doing it in kind of the day-to-day as well.

JILL LYONS 
Matt, you bring up a really good point, which is the strength of a PMO and an organized, networked organization is that you’re not solving the problems over and over and over again, right? You’re learning something on one project that you’re taking to the next project. That’s so critical for an organization to grow, evolve, scale.

MATT AUSTIN 
Yeah. Project management can be part of that institutional memory.

JILL LYONS 
Absolutely.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
What’s your top piece of advice, either for a creative looking to develop project management skills or, alternately, a project manager in some other industry looking to apply some of what you’ve learned to their work?

MATT AUSTIN
I think treat it like the craft that it is. Whether your title is project manager or you’re a creative, those project management skills bring value to your organization. Owning those skills makes you more valuable in your current position, and it makes you more marketable when you’re looking for the next one. So invest in professionalizing that skill, and you’re going to have a more successful career.

JILL LYONS
I think that that’s great advice. There are so many tools and resources out there, PMI being such an institution—it’s like the Harvard of project management. These are learnable skills. These are learnable, teachable skills. Of course, there are people like me who keep my spice rack very organized. I love order and process and organization. I’m going to go further, maybe, with some of those skills and training and development. But even if you’re on the other side of like, your spice rack’s a mess, there’s still some foundational skills to learn about: time management, what works for you in terms of getting things done. There are a thousand different systems out there. I like to say it doesn’t matter which system you use. The more important thing is that you stick to a toolkit.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Jill, Matt, this has been great. I can tell how much you love doing what you do, so I want to end with this question: Why are you passionate about your work? What lights you up about your job?

JILL LYONS 
For me, I love efficiency. I love efficiency, and I love seeing things happen. I love change. I love the future. I believe that we can and should be better than we are in all things as people, as humanity. And I think that productivity and efficiency are kind of my love language. I like to get things done. And I don’t like to talk about it, I like to be about it. And so this is a way, maybe, for some of my neuroses to come out in a positive way. I get really excited about making things happen. I’m just thrilled that I’ve been lucky enough in my career to be able to do this in a high-touch, creative environment, which I love.

MATT AUSTIN
I really enjoy being able to bring people together to solve problems. Where I am now, at Jellyfish, we kind of do it all. We’ve got creative media, analytics, customer experience, AI (artificial intelligence)—you name it, we probably do it. In some of the accounts, we bring all these really smart people to bear at the same time. And I’m in this really privileged position of getting to work with them and facilitate the process of building solutions for some of these really exciting companies. Also, it’s the team. I’m really fortunate that I’m working with a really exceptional group of project managers right now. Our America’s PM team, we’ve got staff in Mexico, we’ve got staff in Brazil, the U.S. There’s this diversity of thought because we all come from these different cultural perspectives. It’s made our team really effective and resilient and positive, and I just really enjoy working with the team.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Thanks so much.

MATT AUSTIN 
You’re very welcome.

JILL LYONS 
Thanks for having us. It was really great.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
And thank you for listening to Projectified. Like what you heard? Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a rating or review. Your feedback matters a lot—it helps us get the support we need to continue making this show. And be sure to visit us online at PMI.org/podcast, where you’ll find the full transcripts for episodes as well as links to related content like useful tools and templates, the latest research reports, and more. Catch you next time!

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