The Digital Project Manager

Are you starting your projects off on the right foot and giving them the best chances for success? Project beginnings can be ambiguous and confusing—in this episode, Suze Haworth shows us her approach for getting clarity, setting expectations, and making sure the bases are covered, before the project is underway. 

Planning a vacation? In order to step away from work without having to answer emails during your time off, you need a successful project handoff. In this episode, PM Mackenzie Dysart walks you through the steps to make project transitions a breeze so you can enjoy your vacation and ensure you don’t return to chaos!

When requirements are too loose, your results are undefined and unpredictable. Too tight, and you end up with blind spots. In this episode, PM expert Kelly Suter tell us how to nail the requirements gathering process so your clients know what’s being delivered and your teams know exactly what they’re delivering.

If you ask just about any PM how their work is going, how do you think they'll respond? 'Sorry, I've got no time to talk right now, I'm totally slammed! Maybe we can touch base next week? 'My own experience of PM'ing is that it's a demanding role, we carry the responsibility of delivering a project to our best ability and we desperately want our projects to succeed. So we run around as though our pants were on fire, trying to herd cats, and doing things that we think will make our project succeed. But is our busyness really helping deliver a better project? Is it really helping our team, and our client? Maybe, but often, it's not. So what's the solution?  All will be revealed in today's podcast as we talk about ways that we can be less busy, but more productive. 

Scope creep can be very costly and very hard to identify—and, luckily, very manageable. In this episode, we talk about scope creep, what causes it, and ways to manage scope creep with Suze Haworth, a Senior Digital Project Manager with over a decade worth of experience in web builds, social campaigns, and digital media.  

How do you draw the line between project management and becoming everyone else’s personal admin? As a PM, do you find yourself doing the “project dirty work?” In this episode, PM expert Patrice Embry dishes out valuable advice for PMs who suspect that they’re taking on too much admin work and want to get back to doing what they do best—being a PM!

“Oh, I love being managed!”, said no one ever. How do we manage our teams effectively without being micromanager? How do we manage agile teams who don’t want to be managed? In this episode, Sarah Hoban, a PMP-certified Project and Program Manager, talks about how to do your job effectively as a project manager on the sly. 

Are you delivering projects on budget, on time, and in scope? You want your team to be able to hit their milestones—and it’s your job to guide the process with project controls. In today’s DPM podcast with project manager expert Maik Stettner you’ll learn how to use project control documents like status reports and RAID logs in order to keep your projects on track. 

Triumph over the contracting madness: Alexa Huston explains how an agile contract can benefit your project—and how to get buy-in from clients. This episode offers welcome advice for anyone struggling with the awkward space between fixed scope and agile projects, discussing the challenges, benefits, and drawbacks of working with different types of agile contracts.

If we don't end our projects right, we can end up going over budget, delivering late, annoying our team, and the client. Ben chats with Patrice to discuss how we can end projects better with a checklist of what to do, and what not to do.