Project Management for Marketers: The Plan You Need For The Results You Want - A REVIEW

“I like a man who grins when he fights.” Winston Churchill

I had the privilege of touring London. It is a city rich in heritage, draped with beauty, and home to ancestors on my father’s side. I was surprised that my favorite stop was the Winston Churchill War Museum. 

I walked down concrete, narrow walls, below street surfaces, past tiny offices with cots in them, breathing in stale air that seems to still linger from his days. The complex is surprisingly simple and basically essential. 

There was no flaunting of supremacy nor declaration of entitlement. Men and women spent months on end working and sleeping in makeshift quarters to win the most mission-critical days their country had faced.

It was within this compound that strategy was argued, objectives were set and plans were made. Defeat was not an option. As Churchill said, “It is no use saying ‘We are doing our best.’ We have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.”

My office is a bit more comfortable. My work is no less important. Bombs are not dropping near me; letters of condolences to grieving parents are not being sent. Yet, I am in a fight, and I must succeed. As must you.

As marketers, results are tied to our efforts, and lives are tied to those results. End users, company employees, families of our marketing team - we make their life better or worse by what we do, or why do what we do in the first place? A raise here; a solution there; a win all around; they matter.

I remind myself of this whenever I am tempted to coast. Unless there is a cost on the line and a need to win, I can easily approach projects with a “phone-it-in” attitude. As a professional speaker, I admit there were times I relied on winging it; those were never my best moments. 

All of which brings us to project management. We need a system, and within our system we need a framework. As Jake Knapp (Sprint: How To Solve Big Problems And Test New Ideas In Just Five Days) writes, “Lurking beneath every goal are dangerous assumptions. The longer those assumptions remain unexamined, the greater the risk.” 

In the CXL Institute course, Project Management For Marketers, Alexa Hubley does an outstanding job of laying out just such a framework. 

Beyond Just Doing Our Best

Alexa points out that a failure to execute project management within our marketing leads to:

1. A lack of resources: People fall prey to being busy and priority fails to be focused on what really matters. Time is dishonored as projects are rushed into. Output is minimized as projects are subjected to cut-backs rather than maximum production.
2. A lack of scope: Without proper scope, projects become over-committed or under-committed, and creep sets in where deadlines are push-backed.
3. A lack of proper attribution: Goals become vague, KPIs are not tracked for each campaign piece, and actionable learning is unaddressed.

This is hardly the way to win. Unless going through the motions is your team’s favorite exercise, then more is required.

Project management that gets you the results you want coordinates people, priorities and processes and arranges them strategically to accomplish one objective. Alexa outlines the framework for each.

People Involved

Winning project management organizes a launch squad around an objective. People are aligned around four roles:

1. Driver: The driver is one or more persons who gains stakeholder buy-in, collecting the information that is needed and keeping the project and the team on track.
2. Approver: The approver is the one person who makes the ultimate decisions. Though typically the Project Manager or Marketing Manager, others may fulfill this role. 
3. Contributors: The contributors consist of team members across the company and others on the marketing team. They are consultants, providing expertise and experience to inform the campaign formation.
4. Informed: The informed are often senior leaders, and especially, those affected by the decisions made.

In my own leadership, I have arrived at deciding the “who” of the above through asking questions:

• Who knows what they need to know to efficiently lead us from start to finish?
• Who shoulders ultimate responsibility for the outcome of this project? Who will be held accountable for failure?
• Who knows what we need to know?
• Who needs to know what we know?

Priorities Identified

Alexa presents four calculated campaign steps to ensure priorities are rightly identified.

Look Back: The first step is an evaluation of what has worked before, what needs improvement and what can be added or removed. In my own work, I have framed this around four particular questions: 

• What is working that needs to be maximized?
• What is not working that needs to be corrected?
• What is missing that needs to be added?
• What is confusing that needs to be clarified?

Deep Dive: The second step is to get into the details of the projects - What projects will be taken on and what steps will be taken in each project? Alexa outlines a scorecard for ideas based on Urgency (how important is this), Effort (what is required to complete it) and Feasibility (can it be launched within the needed time frame). 

OKR: The third step addresses the objectives and key results for each objective. What can be accomplished within the next quarter, and what will be the measurable outcome?

Date Map: The final step puts action steps into the calendar on a quarterly, monthly and weekly basis in order to verify that the flow will work within the timing initially set. An eye is kept on where activities may bottleneck or where schedule conflicts may be anticipated.

Processes Implemented

Relying on the Sprint framework encouraged by Jake Knapp, Alexa teaches a strategic process that incorporates five components.

Map is where the team does research and sets targets for a project. Research is conducted implementing user polls,, time to value analyses and industry-insider interviews. Targets are then delineated based on the research findings.

Sketch encompasses pitching ideas and voting as a team on what will be pursued. The priority, of course, is on the best ideas that lead to the clearly stated objective and targets.

Decide expands on the ideas chosen and defines the plan and scope of the project, the overview and the specifics.

Prototype builds out the idea to where it is enough to be tested. The goal is not perfection, but usability.

Test follows the procedure of interviews, reflection and prioritization. Alexa defines the reflection stage as “How might we”? Based on the findings of interviews, how might we adjust our plan based on the user experience we tested? Priority is then given to the newly proposed solutions.

Project Management as proposed by Alexa in this CXL Institute course is critical. This particular framework is thorough, complete, and yet easy to implement. Even more, it enhances team contribution and decision making, and by nature incorporates the involvement of others outside the marketing team.

Churchill is famous for saying simply, “Never give up.” I might add, “Start well to end well.”