Introduction to Project Management

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Role of project manager

Project managers play a crucial role in digital marketing. They help to ensure that campaigns:

• Meet the brief with high quality output
• Are delivered and deployed on time
• Are delivered within the agreed budget

A wide range of project management frameworks and methodologies are available. These include PRINCE2, Scrum, Lean, Critical Chain Project Management, and more. Here, however, we’ll take a broad look at the value that project management and project managers bring to marketing campaigns.

What is a project?

Any initiative your team undertakes that has a defined deliverable and delivery date can be classed as a project. And any project can benefit from the efficiency and clarity that project management will bring.

Planning is a key starting point for any project. Unfortunately, project management can easily be overlooked when planning resources for a campaign. Unless it’s already baked into a company’s culture, it can seem unnecessary, especially for smaller projects. And for agencies it can be even harder to justify, as clients don’t like paying for resource that doesn’t seem to be crucial to getting the campaign delivered.

Benefits of project management

The benefits include:

• Fluid communication between stakeholders, marketers, clients, external suppliers, and so on
• On-hand status updates on where the project is at any time
• Resource planning, ahead of when it is needed rather than being called for reactively
• An accountable, central point of contact to manage the web of interdependencies in a project
• Client assurance and confidence
• Predictable deadlines