Project Coordinator

We Are Sweet has seen lots of changes in the last couple of years and there are more on the horizon. The team is growing and we’re continuing to refine the way we work. The majority of recruitment over the past 12 months has focused on what we refer to as “production”: the designers and developers that do the magical creative work for our clients at We Are Sweet.

However, the most recent talent to join the team is not graphics or code-based and this represents a real milestone in our growth. Our newest team member has filled the fast-paced, super nimble, robust heavy-duty-steel-toe-capped boots of what we have labeled “Project Coordinator”.

Doing what you love

With the ‘Do what you love’ mantra at the core of our team, we noticed just how much work was involved in developers managing their own schedule, communicating with clients, testing their work and completing administrative tasks. These aren't things developers usually enjoy doing and micromanaging isn’t for us. We employed the very best developers we could find to create the best websites and systems they can. We didn’t recruit this talented group to do things they don’t love doing.

I am a designer at heart. A diverse skill set surrounding web design has been really beneficial to my work. 3D design experience can aid your 2D designs. Video editing can benefit your online animation choices and spacial awareness is universal throughout layout design. Once upon a time I even coded websites… but it certainly isn’t my forte, which our developers will attest to! 

I realised early on that my strongest skills are in designing user experiences that are easy to use and look great. My understanding of how systems are built and operate at a technical level, enables me to create platform concepts that will work in development but this doesn’t mean I’m the best person to create these ideas as code. Writing code just doesn’t excite me in the way that brandishing a digital paintbrush does and I’m a firm believer in doing work you enjoy. When you truly give a shit, you do amazing work.  

We want coders to code, designers to design and of course, coordinators to coordinate all of these projects. Just as code turns me off, opening up Photoshop or meticulously placing keyframes in After Effects is the nightmare scenario of many developers. We want our project coordinator to coordinate projects and we want that person to enjoy what that entails.

Organising is a Specialist Skill

Drawing up somebody else’s schedule, making sure a client is completely up to date with progress and ensuring everyone is in the right place at the right time for that all-important meeting might not be everyone’s dream. However, there’s no denying that building a well-oiled machine that doesn’t miss a beat and consistently delivers is incredibly satisfying.

Organisation is a skill made up of a variety of sub-skills: initiative, communication, personnel management and attention to detail. Talking the language of developers and marketing managers simultaneously translating each while dissecting the key information in a way that everyone can understand is a truly unique skill. It’s a difficult task and it requires the right sort of person to embrace that challenge. Project coordination is a specialist skill and we’ve found ourselves someone that’s great at it. He’s great because he loves it.

Meet JT

After meeting with a wide array of candidates we bumped into James. He has an immensely positive attitude, determination to grow and all the core project coordinator skills we were looking for. The only real draw-back was adding yet another James to a team made up of people with identical or similar names! But if anyone could effectively assign the correct James to a task, it was this James. To make identifying James Amos-Thompson a little easier, everyone at We Are Sweet and many of our clients affectionately refer to him as JT. 

James has been part of the team for 6 months and has scaled the cliff-face of a learning curve that is the We Are Sweet client base. Our business is built around truly understanding our clients and their unique requirements, quirks and teams on a personal level. Our long-term client partnerships come with a lot of history. JT has dived in at the deep end and is swimming confidently forward with the internal team and clients alike.

Service, Service, Service.

JT is a hard-working dynamo. He picks up anything and everything that James Haigh and I don’t have time to do as Directors. This is is really powerful from a company perspective. Time is precious and now the company Directors have more to dedicate to being managers, nurturing relationships and improving our processes.

An extra pair of hands, another set of eyes and an additional layer of quality assurance mean we are offering a better service at every level, from consultancy through design, development, testing and delivery. 

The Cost

Part of the deal of employing people is that you have to pay them!  We’re running a profitable company and when we bill our clients for development I can easily justify what we pay our developers. That exercise is tangible and easy to process. But JT didn't initially have any billable time as such, there was no obvious connection between what he does day-to-day and what we invoice to our clients. As a business owner, it can be difficult to get that through your head in the beginning.

It could have felt like we had spent money on improving the experience for clients with almost no payback, but it didn't. From the day James joined us it felt like the right decision. Everyone in the company is less consumed by all the organisation that surrounds every task. We’re less stressed and more available to focus on doing the things we enjoy doing as individuals.

All this efficiency and productivity has ultimately allowed We Are Sweet to take on more work. We offer support contracts to many clients and all of these retainers include project coordination time that is being paid for. JT has been a huge contributor in refining our processes and one of the biggest changes has been how we quote work to include far more project management. The role of project coordinator became completely tangible very quickly and is so embedded into We Are Sweet already that I don't know how we could do without one.

Conclusion

JT has the time to communicate with clients in detail, nudge the team internally and make sure everything marries up. This makes the designers and developers happy, it makes the clients happy and makes me happy as a Director. Knowing that someone is there to check that everything is going to plan gives me peace of mind and that is so valuable. During our recent growth, we’ve heard people say “you need to work on your business and not in it” time and time again. Appointing a project coordinator is probably the most significant step We Are Sweet has taken in allowing me to do just that. 

If you are running a business and you feel stretched in all directions, I can’t recommend recruiting a project coordinator highly enough. Someone who just “does stuff” and make sure things happen on time. The exact job title and description might vary slightly but this operational support role is a game changer! Like always, take time to find the right person and invest in them accordingly. If you want to know more about our guy JT, you can find him here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/james-amos-thompson-059a38a2/

Do you have a position like this in your team already or is it something you are in need of?