Let’s face it. Project Management has a PR problem.
It’s deemed irrelevant by marketing and too far removed from “strategy” to give it any truck in the boardroom. This is obviously a problem since today’s customer driven business landscape is not only putting profound new pressure on the marketing function, such pressures are also forcing marketing to champion the kinds of organizational changes that can only be marshaled by experienced project managers.
But let’s be clear. When we talk about “project management” in this context, what we’re really talking about is the field of applied project management, where the interconnected and interdependent “links” and language between project, program and portfolio management not only help close the gap between strategy and execution, they also provide a common operating theatre for making – and managing – great change.
For marketers reading the article, the best example of this linkage is the Apollo space program. Made up of hundreds of subordinate but critical projects, the NASA space program helped our country realize John Kennedy’s dream for putting Americans in space. The program also fit neatly within our country’s portfolio of strategic initiatives against the Soviets during the “Cold War”.
Like the Soviets and Americans during the Cold War era, a similar polarity exists between the communities of project management and marketing, a frost that must be thawed if today’s chief marketing officers are ever going to be able to institute the systemic changes that shareholders and CEOs are demanding, In short, CMOs need to embrace the principles of applied project management. If only project managers had the marketing chops to convince them!
The PR Problem.
When marketing executives hear “project management” they’re not hearing its strategic linkages with program and portfolio management. They’re immediately envisioning guys in white short-sleeve shirts with pocket protectors applying slide rulers to 40 page documents for temporary and unique projects, probably somewhere in the vicinity of the IT department. And why shouldn’t they? It’s called project management, isn’t it?
What’s even more discouraging is that the Project Management Office or “PMO” is tied to the same doomed brand under which project management continually labors. Typically associated with non-strategic “worker–bee” tasks like cost containment and rigid project maintenance and tracking, most marketers and senior executives don’t recognize the PMO as the “Performance Marketing Office” it could be.
The PM Solution
Marketers are always talking about performance marketing, with its commitment to brand centered process and metrics, but are rarely able to meet the organizational (integration/alignment) challenges necessary to make the promise of performance marketing a reality. But if chief marketing officers rebranded the project management PMO as the performance marketing PMO, everything would change.
Think about it. By changing the words project management to performance marketing, senior management could enthusiastically embrace such efforts with the same vim and check writing vigor they apply to so many high priced consulting firms tasked with the organizational changes that the company itself must ultimately make.
If marketing operations were part of the project management office, marketing executives, tasked with connecting call centers, websites and customer facing databases in the name the of improved customer communications and “insights”, would suddenly be working with project and program managers armed with the experience, tools and charters required to actually achieve such tasks.
Higher level portfolio managers, cut from the project management cloth, could work side-by-side with CMOs and CEOs assessing the risks and rewards of new market driven opportunities before they are blindly adopted by middle managers who are, often, blissfully unattached to the pesky responsibilities of execution.
Given its new performance centric mandate, the old project management office would morph from its cost containment M.O. (forgive the dueling acronyms here) to the more modern and productive “throughput model” of a PMO, aligning projects and resources around strategic initiatives; a more customer facing and profit driven posture where waste and failed projects naturally get jettisoned in the glaring light of organizational focus.
The entire discipline of enterprise marketing management (EMM) for example would naturally live within this new PMO, where a focus on brand, in combination with improvements in process could inform opportunities for enterprise software, helping puts “edges” on customer insights (through improved segmentation, data mining and predictive modeling), supporting ever more informed decisions about future resources and brand spending.
Project management’s virtuous cycle of “Plan, Do, Check” would harmoniously co-exist with integrated marketing communications’ (IMCs) “5-Step Process” of improved brand communications. The strategy-execution gap that exists for so many organizations would shrink as corporate leaders recognize that the changes they need to be strategically aligned around customers can – and must – come from within their own organizations.
The Ultimate Project
Today, the culture and communities of marketing and project management couldn’t be farther apart. The Cold War continues But as the web gives consumers more and more influence over corporate America’s production, sales and service cycles, companies are being forced to become ever more horizontal in their organizational structure; moving from product driven silos to customer driven – and ever more “cross-functional” – teams. The good news is that cross-functionality already exists within the DNA of project and program management, and as such, already holds within it the genes of organizational change that CMOs are ultimately looking for. The bad news is that project managers are very poor marketers and will remain forever locked in their short sleeved world unless they can embrace the ultimate project of rebranding the PMO. A crazy idea? Maybe. But crazy ideas have put men on the moon!
