Now hiring—Project Manager
About the Job
Strateligent® project manager responsibilities revolve around monitoring performance and pushing projects forward towards delivery, while operations management is focused on monitoring metrics from a higher level, plus resource* planning.
Key roles for Strateligent project manager responsibilities are:
- Setting objectives: creating a project scope, estimating time, costs and developing budgets and timelines
- High-level to-dos, role and task planning and resource management
- Putting together a project team (employees, contractors, vendors) and leading it towards project completion
- Preparing project documentation, intake packet, creative brief, resources, assets
- Monitoring time management and ensuring tracked time on projects
- Supervising and coordinating work and approving tracked time
- Regularly communicating with clients
- Working closely with operations manager and creative director in overseeing utilization, profit and other conversion metrics
- Reporting project success to operations manager and creative director
- Assisting operations manager and creative director with resource recruitment and encouraging top resource performance
Strateligent project managers need to have a mix of leadership, negotiation and interpersonal skills, such as:
- Ability to change, grow
- Decisiveness
- Problem-solving
- Organized
- Stress management
- Concise communication
- Desire to accomplish, hungry, driven
- Proactive
- Confidentiality
- Honesty
- Advocating for and delivering upon the business goals of the company
The most important activities that Strateligent project managers perform.
1. Budgeting
As a Strateligent project manager, you can’t begin a project without understanding its requirements and estimating timeline and costs. Once you know what your clients expect as deliverables, you need to plan out who will work on which project or task and when, how long each phase will take, figure out if you’ll need partner contractors or have any additional expenses.
This initial budgeting phase will automatically serve as a blueprint for resource planning, task management and finally—profit that will come out of a particular project. Budgeting is also something you’ll keep going back to as a reference as teammates track time in Function Fox.
All resource planning, task management, timelines, and budgeted is to be accomplished through Function Fox or Basecamp that allow project managers and operation manager a unified ability to plan, manage and schedule.
2. Resource planning and task management
You’ll need to collaborate on a daily basis to analyze how much time has been rendered and monitor how projects are moving along. As a project manager, you’ll decide on time estimates for tasks and evaluate team availability on a weekly basis. Optimizing resource planning along the way will help you predict and increase your revenue.
3. Time and expense monitoring
A big part of project management is time and expense monitoring. The main question to answer here is how is the performance of the teammates you chose affecting your utilization and profitability? (Time estimated versus time rendered, timeline forecasted versus timeline achieved)
4. Communicating with clients
Staying in touch with clients throughout a project’s phases is one of the most delicate parts of successful collaboration. From a project’s kickoff to finish, you need to keep clients informed about progress in a way that will make them happy, but not build up false expectations. To keep clients happy and see profit from projects, you need to monitor how time is being spent and organize regular sync meetings with agendas created/submitted to clients 24 hours before the meeting. Additionally, during the meeting the project manager is responsible for efficiently and effectively guiding the meeting stakeholders through the meeting agenda. It is imperative Strateligent project management is seen as a value-added service by our clients.
5. Reporting KPIs to Operations Manager and Creative Director
To keep track of the KPI’s you need to report real-time data. To get the most accurate data possible, one of your main tasks as Strateligent project manager is to properly create each project and monitor how much time has been rendered against how much time has been proposed.
Project Manager Best Practices
Project managers can run projects in many different ways, but with time, best practices will rise to the surface.
1. Set clear objectives and tasks ownership and responsibilities
One of the main downfalls of any project is when its objectives aren’t set right. You can’t reach concrete goals if you don’t have them defined. This is why planning is just as important as the execution phase. Keeping everyone informed on project objectives and being transparent about how they’ll be met will result in better project delivery.
What helps in achieving project goals is setting clear ownership of tasks and responsibilities within a project. This especially applies in a remote workplace. Giving teammates more responsibility and ownership will enable smoother delivery in the long run.
The project manager owns the intake packet, creative brief, and the accuracy of it.
2. Manage expectations, from start to finish
Managing expectations begins at a project’s launch and ends when it’s delivered. When a project doesn’t meet the expectations of its owners, clients, teammates and other stakeholders involved, it’s probably due to inadequate communication. When setting up the stage of a project, always think about who needs to be informed, when and about what.
3. Look for ways to streamline communication and next steps
To get everyone on the same page, look for ways to streamline communication regarding project updates. Having Basecamp to keep everyone informed about project updates will simultaneously serve as a place to keep track of project progress. Though it may seem counterintuitive, it’s better to get 15 people on a 30-minute sync call at once than sending out multiple emails or having different time slots for different project teams.
4. Manage (avoid) scope creep
There’s rarely a project that doesn’t experience scope creep. Every project manager can admit to having experienced delays, miscommunication, insufficient budgets, resources dropping projects (mid-project) and similar roadblocks that all lead to unhappy teammates and clients.
So, one of your main tasks is keeping scope creep under control. How can that be done?
- Keep all stakeholders in the loop from the project’s kickoff
- On a weekly basis, compare actual work that’s done with what was agreed upon
- Make it a habit to have daily or at least weekly syncs to keep track of the scope
- When determining changes within the scope, make sure to update clients on changes and manage their budget and timeline expectations
5. Use time-tracking tools to get consolidated data
Function Fox and Basecamp gives a project manager consolidated data that matters for them to make informed decisions. You’ll get that data by making sure all your teammates are regularly tracking time.
6. Budgeting
Strateligent needs a strong grip on their budgeting and profitability management.
As services are used and your teammates track time against those services and on different projects, your project budgets will start getting used and that’s how you monitor the state of each project’s utilization and profitability.
7. Resource Planning
A big part of managing resources and their schedules in production is having an all-in-one system that incorporates time off management, too.
Project managers have a high-level perspective of all agency employees, contractors, and their available time
- Manage teammates’ workloads easily by moving resources around
- See who’s overbooked with heatmaps and who needs to join a different project team
- Use Placeholders to create hiring scenarios for upcoming project work with operations manager
- Track and manage time off with operations manager
8. Project Management
In Basecamp projects you can set up and streamline your project and task work through different views: choose from the List, Table, Board, Calendar, or Timeline view.
In tasks, you can add subscribers so they can keep track of progress, assign date ranges and deadlines. To keep clients up-to-date with changes, we invite them into projects, too. This significantly speeds up getting feedback from them and moving projects forward.
9. Reporting
As an Strateligent project manager, many different reports in Function Fox will interest you. Once agency’s budgets are set right and your team members are tracking time daily, you can quickly access reports concerning operations, forecasting, people, payments, and more.
Qualifications for Strateligent Project Manager
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, business, or a related field
- 5-8 years of project management and related experience
- Project Management Professional (PMP) certification preferred
- Proven ability to solve problems creatively
- Strong familiarity with project management software tools, methodologies, and best practices
- Experience seeing projects through the full life cycle
- Excellent analytical skills
- Strong interpersonal skills, extremely resourceful, and proactive
- Proven ability to complete projects according to outlined scope, budget, and timeline
* Resource = Strateligent staff and/or contracted partners
Other duties to be assigned. Project Manager will work in collaboration with Strateligent’s Operations Manager on a daily basis.
Our Vision
Improve the future for our clients, our communities, and ourselves.
Our Mission
Communicate with the sole purpose of positively changing hearts and impacting minds.
Our Values
- Healthy
- Trustworthy
- Collaborative
- Victorious Mindset
- Adaptable
- Proactive
- Peacemakers
Get to know the STR team
Our advertising agency is a perfect blend of storytellers, project managers, copywriters, graphic designers, web development wizards, social media gurus, video production specialists, and digital marketing strategists.