It’s been three months since I passed the torch of the Director of Production to Denise Lao and moved into my new role as Director of Business Development. As the year closes, I have been spending a lot of time practicing our new capabilities presentation which is called “Bringing it to Digital.”
In the presentation we talk about the three Ps which are People, Passion, and Process. We also talk about how we work and how we plan and how we activate. In any organization these elements ultimately are driven by the quality of the project management team. My grandfather, a WWII Commissioned Officer, wrote to me when I was in basic training at Ft. Sill, OK that the non-commissioned officer(NCO) is the back bone of any successful operation because they can command soldiers effectively to follow the battle plan and adapt if necessary if the battle dictates it.
Like those sergeants who drive soldiers through training and into combat, I believe the Project Managers are critical to success in a digital operation like the one Flightpath is engaged in. So, as I look back on the year I wanted to celebrate these three Ps, so exemplified by our project managers and take a moment to blog about what a privilege it was to lead and manage that group in ’07 and ‘08.
PASSION. NYU management professor, Dr. Arthur Matthews, encouraged me (and Director of Technology Alex Lindgren) to become a playmaker and give the staff opportunities to make plays. Well, we have some great finishers on the project team here at Flightpath. This past year when given the opportunity, the project managers passionately earned their PMP credential with the esteemed Jack Davis of Knowledgemovers. Since then we have adopted new cutting edge tools like Liquid Planner that will give us a competitive advantage in managing resources and schedules in constantly evolving new ways.
PROCESS. These project managers helped build a Project Management Office with other new processes and procedures that help the company be more efficient and drive client success through team resourcefulness. Together, we
- developed a sophisticated hiring process (see blog post: Hiring 2.0) that has yielded promising staffers many of whom have already been promoted into new roles
- detailed training programs and manuals for new hires
- we instituted a continuity process for the hand-off of projects during vacation or training time that has kept us on track for our clients
- numbers and schedules became more important and more available through a dashboard,
- we began conducting in project reviews and serious after action reviews aka “close out meetings” which helped us continue to evolve the process by learning from what we did right and what we could do differently.
And there’s so much more, I can’t put it all in this blog post.
PEOPLE. Deanna is so good at her job, clients send her cookies. Denise is so good at her job she gets invited to party with famous people like Paige Davis (see her blog post about that night :). I am confident that our newest PM, Jonathan, will receive similar gratitude from clients for his digital excellence as he learns from the best in the business.
But it really is their individual drive and determination that I am so proud of. They consistently exhort the staff to display the team resourcefulness we talk about as part of Bringing it to Digital. I had the opportunity to work very closely with the best project managers on the planet. I wanted to publicly say thanks to them, thanks to Jon Fox for giving me the opportunity, and wish them good luck as they move into the new year with new leadership. It gives me great confidence to know that when I give new clients “permission to believe” in bringing it to digital we have a great Project Management Office that can consistently deliver superior digital solutions and take the ball across that goal line.
And a Happy New Year to everyone!
