Managing Design Projects

The presentation below is based on PM in an advertising agency, follows a waterfall approach and shows actions and tips for onboarding, team assign and workflow.

The deal with the client is made, price agreement and contract are signed - what is next?

1. Onboarding  2. Assign Team  3. Workflow

1. ONBOARDING

• Goal: to discuss the payment schedule and to make sure everybody is clear & on the same page

• Actions: strategy sessions (kick-off meeting & brief review)

Kick-off meeting: goal – to strategize with the client. Considering the product or result they want, talk about different ways you can complete that. This is a discovery stage.

* In the following 1-2 weeks (before the brief review) compile notes, create the design strategy and assign the team.

Brief review (meet the client again, after the 1-2 weeks): goal – to make sure everybody is on the same page. Considering what you heard so far, this is how you interpret it into a design project. In this way, you are building up to a solution, rather than just going straight into the design, which a lot of designers want to do. The brief review saves revision time.

• Tip: process billing - 50% of the payment upfront & 25% when you’re 75% complete. If you agreed on 2 revisions cycles, collect 25% before the first revision and the last 25% upon delivery. In the worst-case scenario, you only lose out on the last 25% (which should be your profit margin), so you’re not in the red on the project, saving the company a lot of financial stress.

2. ASSIGN TEAM

• 3 basic roles – project manager, creative director and design fulfilment team

• Goal – the PM and CD collaboratively come up with the task calendar, the overall project needs are broken up into individual pieces (tasks), with deadlines and assigned team members

• Project Manager: makes the tasks and deadlines calendar and ensures deadlines are met, is the liaison between team and client and collaborates with the clients to make sure they don’t feel like they are left in the dark and that they see progress on their project

• Creative Director: manages the team to make sure they have everything they need to fulfil tasks, oversees the creative direction of a project to make sure the design fulfilment team is staying true to the brief, fills gaps to make sure there is progress (so if 2 people on the execution team are busy doing tasks, but there is something the team is behind with, the CD jumps in to fill the gap, to make sure the project is moving along).

• Fulmilment Team: coders, programmers, illustrators, graphic designers, copywriters, they complete the deliverable and report to the PM.

3. WORKFLOW

• Ensure a buffer when communicating the final timeline to the client.

Team: 1 week → PM: 2 weeks → Client: 3-4 weeks

In this way, no one is mad at each other at the end and you give the team and yourself time for error troubleshooting, for when things don’t go as planned.

• Break the project into tasks and milestones: milestones are key points in the project where you should probably meet with the client again and go over everything. Before revision cycle is a big milestone

Tasks have 4 stages (Kanban): TO DO → DOING → FOR REVIEW ( by the PM or by the client) → DONE

Once a task is done we’re on to the next tasks and when they are all done, the project is complete.

• Feedback compiling: clients send feedback almost instantly when they see a design, in the form of little tasks. The natural reaction is to respond by working on it right away (because it is only going to take 5 minutes). When you receive 20 of these little tasks, they add up, and the team can end up in revision cycle hell, where revision never seems to end - you don’t know where in the revision cycle you are and there is no clarity on when does revision start, when did we complete cycle 1, or what cycle are we in? Therefore, it is a good idea to compile all the feedback, put it in the notes or feedback section and when you’re done and ready to go to revision, you will contact the client - we try to make sure that we stay within scope, here is a list with all the feedback we received from you to this point before we go to revision, is there anything you want to add/change/take away from this list to make sure that we are only withing the first revision cycle, so we don’t have to charge for any overages? Clients appreciate this because they know that you were listening and keeping track of everything and that you try to keep them within scope and budget. Your team is going to appreciate you because you’re not overworking them, giving them tasks all the time and throwing them out of their workflow. Sometimes it takes willpower to just not do the feedback right away, but this will save a lot of time.