The Shortlist Episode 90: Project Management Tips for the Busy Marketer

Strong project management isn’t just for the construction jobsite—it’s a critical skill for every AEC marketer. In this episode of The Shortlist, Wendy Simmons is joined by Melissa Richey and Lauren Jane Peterson to explore how marketers naturally step into project management roles across proposals, events, and campaigns. From defining scope and managing risk to leading communication and keeping teams aligned, the MO6 team breaks down practical strategies that keep work moving. We also dive into effective kickoff meetings, visual communication tools, and how project management platforms like ClickUp, Basecamp, and Asana can help streamline workflows.

Ultimately, successful project management comes down to clear communication and team accountability to stay organized, efficient, and ahead of deadlines—and this episode is chalk full of tips for day-to-day project management.

CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 6

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to The Shortlist. We're exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist. I'm Wendy Simmons, and today we're talking with Melissa Richey, Lauren Jane Peterson to discuss project management.

Hi, Melissa. Hi, Lauren Jane.

Hey, Wendy.

Hi.

Thank you both for jumping on the podcast and tackling an enormous topic, project management.

We'll share with the listeners a little bit more of like how we're gonna focus this topic, but as a warm up, I'm just curious, what is your project management world look like today or this week? You know, how many things are you juggling?

Give our listeners a sense of your world and the million things you're trying to keep straight.

A little bit of everything. We have a couple website projects that we've got going. I personally working on one of them.

Lauren Jane's working on two of them. We have some rebrand project that we're working on. A couple project pursuits and then various other business development activities for Middle of Six, bringing in more work and more clients.

So always a lot going on. And so that's why strong project management is really important.

The last time you were recording a podcast with you, you were saying you had like eight proposals going on between you and your proposal teams doing stuff. So now we're like over to the website world and branding and facilitation and discoveries.

Yes.

They kind of go in waves. I'm sure like even some of our AEC friends, they get into moments where it's all proposals and then now it's all something else in that way. All right.

Well, Lauren Jane, you've probably got a lot of overlap with Melissa there, but you want to give us a sense of what you're working on and the number of things and how you keep it straight.

Yeah, very similar to Melissa. So I'm on two really large website projects, and then I am a addition to one smaller website project that we have going on.

We are also in person with clients this week, so juggling that and ensuring that all the projects that I am project managing continue to run while I'm on site with other clients.

Yeah, I mean, we sit in a different seat than when we were in-house, but we were juggling lots of things too, and I just want to say I think this is going to be really relevant for anyone whether you maybe are on an agency or consulting side or if

you're in-house, or whether you're marketing BD or actually running your firm. We're all project managers, and so I think that's a good sense of like, this episode is for everyone.

So Melissa, tell us what our listeners might get out of this, why we think it's important. What do you have on your mind when you want to take a deep dive into project management?

I think it's a skill that can be so valuable, and it's a way for you to maybe take control of a situation or project that maybe you technically aren't the project manager, but you have a role, and maybe the person who's in that project management

role is not serving you well. So kind of like managing up where you can then have a tactic for someone who's not giving you what you need in your role.

So I think if you're a marketer and you're doing a proposal, you're a project manager, whether you realize it or not. What are the aspects of project management?

Well, defining the scope, so that reading the RFQ, that's defining the scope of what you need to do. You need to identify what the deliverables are.

So that's where you look at what the submission requirements are and assigning who's responsible for that. And then major part of project management is risk management. Identifying the risk and then managing that risk.

So things like having weekly check-ins to make sure people are making progress or having a backup plan if the content doesn't come in. Having a fresh set of eyes, do QA, QC.

Like those are all risks that you are identifying and managing throughout the process. And then communication, being effective communicators across the teams, another vital aspect of project management.

So who's everybody coming to when they want to know what's going on with the proposal or did we hear on The Shortlist? They're coming to the marketing person. So if you didn't think you were a project manager, guess what?

You are.

You can wear that hat.

You've been promoted.

If you do event planning, yeah, if you do social media management, like any of those things, like there are tasks that need to get done and you are the person that's going to see it through.

So I think it's a great way to show a lot of value if you're more junior in your career. I think being a strong project manager is something that other folks are really going to notice and then come to you and give you more responsibility.

I like what you said at the start of that too, is like you are managing up. A lot of times that will happen. Marketing does need to manage up to make sure that everything keeps moving forward.

So you may not own all, well, probably don't own all the pieces of any project, but you have to have those great skills and be able to see ahead so that you can help the whole team achieve, and that's what a great project manager does, is communicate

and helps us all get to the finish line. Well, then let's dig into it.

We're not going to pretend to be project managers on a construction project, or we know that our clients and our past coworkers when we were in-house were actually managing projects in that fashion.

I think that this conversation is a bit more related to the marketing BD or just things that are related to the inner workings of running your business.

That's where our experience is the most, so we'll probably lean on that a bit and talk through how do we keep things running smoothly and well.

Melissa, as you said, communication, that last talking point you mentioned is so important for project management.

Do you want to share some of the strategies or tools that are helpful in making sure you can be the most effective, that you can get people what they need to know so that they can do their job?

Absolutely. I think one of the number ones is if you're going to have a meeting, you're going to have an agenda and best practice, send that agenda around in advance so people know what to expect and come to the meeting prepared.

They can choose to review it or they can choose not to review it, but you've done your due diligence by letting people know what's going to be covered at the meeting and they have an idea of what to expect.

I would tack on to that for some meetings, like pre-reads are also very helpful, so we can think of that as a really in-depth agenda or a really detailed agenda and those pre-reads might even include pre-work.

So if we're doing a discovery session or a workshop, we may not require the participants to give us our answers beforehand, but those individuals who want a little bit more time to think of their answers, everyone has different working styles, have

the opportunity to do so and so that they can come to the meeting and feel prepared. So longer pre-read documents as well as agendas.

Yeah, and if you can get that out sooner, everyone is really busy. You might have to be thoughtful and know your team about how you're flagging that there's an agenda in the body of the invite.

Maybe they're going so fast, they don't even realize that that's in there.

Then if there's a homework assignment, daylighting it, getting it to the top of their list or just making sure they really understand so they're not caught off guard or feeling unprepared when they jump into that meeting.

So yeah, those are two ways to for sure kind of set the team up pretty well. What about any kind of standard tools, forms, anything like that that you have in your back pocket or that your team might be familiar with to help with communication?

Any suggestions or tips on that?

I think anything that is, you can template.

So if it's your proposal response matrix, a responsibility matrix, things that are repeatable, if it's something you're doing over and over again, you've got that template that you can pull out and tweak for the project, but that's a good way to be

Melissa, I was recently presenting the Wild Cards webinar that we've done together in person and at conferences before, and it reminds me of this main takeaway about having those templates, the repeatable stuff, because people, when we're under

stress, we go to process. We lean on process as our crutch or just to help us through. And we do that whether we think about it, it's subconscious or whatever, we just go that direction.

So you can help your team out by creating some repeatable processes, things that are familiar. They know what that interview kickoff agenda is going to look like or whatever it is that you're working on.

That can help the people also if they're a little less prepared, you know, roll into it.

Yeah, like social media, you've got a content calendar that's got, however you have it set up, it's an Excel spreadsheet with tabs for each month, and you're like, oh gosh, I'm busy. What did we do this time last year?

That historical information too can be almost serve as a template.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, Melissa. I deal typically with longer term projects, and so for me, those templates look like what is the framework? What were those phases of the work that we went through?

Because that will likely be repeated, and every project is different, but I can look at here's the baseline, here's a template, and then how do I tweak that? And you were always learning, right?

You may say, all right, well, last time this phase was a little too short, so we need to bump it out. And then you iterate.

Yeah, you're like cutting down some of your own work and administrative work and like building on the next one. You know, you're not starting from scratch, it doesn't feel so daunting.

I want to stay on the topic of communication, if we can, just for a second, because I think there's some other things that have become like the middle of six way that we love doing.

You know, for ourselves, we've just found many survival techniques, you know, working with such a variety of people and working styles and stuff.

So, Lauren Jane, thoughts on like best practices for like sharing, pushing out information, timely follow up on what comes out of those meetings, anything like that, I feel like you're a pro at.

Well, thanks. So, we already talked about agendas, but checking in before, right? I mean, that is the first piece.

What are we going to be doing? What do you need to do? What do you need to have to be prepared?

And then that second piece of, all right, so what I do, this is very typical cadence for anyone who's been in a call with me, all right, so action items I've heard from today's call were, and then I list them off.

Does anybody have anything that they want to add? So, I really regularly put that in the very end of my meetings. I'm sure you guys can attest to that.

You're probably sick of hearing me say it all.

I love it every time.

And I say, great, I will send you an e-mail, typically e-mail. It depends on how our communication cadences are with our clients.

We have a couple of different ways, but typically, I'll send you an e-mail with a list of action items after the meeting, and sometimes I can send it right away, and that is the best. That's the best practice for me because my head is still in it.

Now, we all know the reality of that, and sometimes you have meetings that butt up against it, and you just can't send it right away.

I have also gotten in the practice of putting action items in the chat as we've been talking, and or making notes in our note-taking system of the action items at live, live when they're happening because, again, we all know our brain pivots and it's

like, what was that thing? I never want to be caught in that moment, so that is my process. I will send you an e-mail when we're done, and if I'm not able to get to it right after the call, I love to send it out before the end of the day.

If you wait to the next day, just everything continues on and people's memories get foggy because we all have a lot to do.

We slept. I lose everything when I sleep, which is a good thing, but also, do it soon. Melissa, anything to add in that realm of the communication tips and tools?

Yeah, to add on about the action items in your note-taking.

If you're taking electronic notes, have a checkbox. If you're just scanning back, you can quickly see, oh, those are the action items.

When I was a copious handwritten note-taker, my thing would be to put a little box next to the action item, so then when I flipped back through, I could quickly see what the action items were, so just a little hot tip for me.

Super handy.

Then I aspire to do this, but I don't do a perfect job at it, but I think it's worth sharing, and I try to remind our team about it too, is especially when you have a pretty large, intense meeting, maybe you've come out of a proposal kickoff meeting

or check-in or something, if you can block the time immediately following it to do the work that came out of that meeting, maybe it's not completely, you're not gonna have the six hours to work on that proposal, but to, like Lauren Jane said,

following up with those action items, sending out an email that's nicely detailed with links to the documents. Just giving the team everything you can give them so they can move forward. And also, I don't know, for me, that thing about blocking the

time immediately after means I'm way more likely to just get it done and it can get out of my head. And I do not have to worry about it and think, I gotta get that out.

That's a great tip. I'm also trying to do more of that thanks to Wendy's encouragement.

We're all trying together. It would be great if every meeting we scheduled had an extra 30 minutes or 60 minutes at the end for the follow up. All right.

Well, we talked about notes and taking those notes and stuff. What about, do we dare to talk a little bit about AI notes? How do we feel about that?

I have a very relevant example.

So we were in person with a client yesterday and they were using Gemini note taker during our call. If you had asked me a couple of years ago if I would have liked that, I think I probably would have said, I don't love that.

I don't love that it's taking notes for me. It doesn't come out right. However, we received the notes that were taken by the client's Gemini, I suppose, and they were really helpful.

It summarized them in a very succinct way. It pulled out action items. It also had a transcript, literally word for word, available if you wanted it, but it was able to identify a lot of those key things.

I don't feel comfortable having that be my only recording tool at the moment, but it can catch things that you're like, oh, a couple of people were talking maybe at once.

Or when my hard, the hard thing for me is when I am writing a note, and then someone still is talking and I'm like racing to catch up and catch the note. So that was a pleasant surprise for me, I will say, the AI note taker in the meeting.

Yeah, agreed.

Yeah, it has gotten better. I agree with you or I have this similar experience that in the earlier days of AI note takers, it felt like you had to weed through a lot and they miss some things.

It wasn't quite as nuanced as it is now, and it seems to be getting better and better. And yeah, we have an unwritten rule here internally that it's not great to facilitate and take the notes.

Those are two different parts of your brain that need to be functioning really at their very best to do those jobs. Although I'll make Kyle blush that somehow he manages to take perfect notes while he's facilitating a session.

But that's not going to be the same thing for every single person. If it's not a strength of yours, don't worry about it. There are some tools out there you could get and try, and maybe your company is already supporting, so that is good.

This is not AI related, but it is related to taking notes during a call.

There is something I feel beneficial to potentially showing your notes on the screen during the call.

That feels more in line with active listening, and can keep everyone in the same place, looking at the same items, and can act as a live agenda as you're going through things and can keep people on pace with you. So I will say that is a tool.

If you don't have anybody else in the call with you and you need to take those notes, you can try that.

Yeah, or whatever that template is, if it's a proposal kickoff, sharing the screen and filling it out together with the team on screen share or having people, giving everyone the live link to it and then someone can be in there doing it as well as

Yeah, a page from our playbook is that in a proposal kickoff meeting, having two people from Middle of Six, someone who's facilitating and running through that document, and they're obviously taking lots of notes too, but we have another person there

who's supporting the work and they are that extra set of hands to type in there or if something's, you're taking notes in one area, but someone else can be updating this other area, like this part for questions to ask or the calendar because someone

noted, oh, by the way, I'm out. I mean, to have multiple hands, that's really great. I mean, maybe we're just super lucky, but that's something we get to have, and that keeps people following along with you.

So I think that's a good tip, Lauren Jane, a way to direct the conversation and keep people focused and they can confirm even some small things like, oh, that person's name is spelled this way, or it sounds that way, but it's spelled this way.

You can get things more correct too by taking live notes, and then you don't have to deal with that later on. Let's see here, I feel like we kind of like very naturally ran into being in a meeting, facilitating a kickoff meeting.

We went from prepping the team to do those meetings and taking good notes, but then into the meetings themselves.

So is there anything, either of you want to share, or maybe Melissa, that you have some takeaways from running kickoffs and getting the team going in the right direction?

You know, we talked about action items, but being very clear about who's taking the action item, so that it's not all on you as the proposal manager, or all on the project manager who's writing everything.

So, you know, okay, who's taking the action item for that? And let someone volunteer for it.

And you might have a lot of Type A overachievers on your team, and the same person keeps raising their hand, and then you, I've got this running list, we're like, okay, well, 15 of the action items are for Lauren Jane.

So, let's take another look and see how we can divide that up. So I think that clarity is super helpful.

I will add, I am always asking, okay, when can you get that to me by?

Or when do you need that by, either way?

Yep.

Yeah. Yeah, that's really good.

And then, you know, I found that like in certain meetings, depending on like how big that meeting is, maybe you just, as the project manager, you need to like have a executive level champion, someone who's like a decision maker or can make the call

right then to say, we are doing that, we aren't doing that, this is a good use of time and resources. Yes, I want you to go over there and do this things.

Like sometimes, you know, it's not necessarily the project manager's call to do that, but you need someone with that either authority or just the energy is actually what I'm getting at.

It's less about authority and it's more of like rallying the team. So I feel like that's kind of a piece of getting a project started off on the right foot.

If either you have that energy and authority or you have someone in there with you to kind of make sure the team.

Yeah, the other thing I've seen with like an executive level person where someone says, well, I would like to do that, but I'm already doing this other thing.

And I've seen an executive say, I will get that other thing off your plate so you can do this because this is more important. So that's another nice piece. And that's not something that lingers on.

It gets dealt with in the meeting.

Yeah, so true. Like how many interview preps have we been in and people feel like, I can't, I don't have the time, right? Like I have to do this at my job site or something.

And it's amazing what having the right person in the room who can make that cleared away or find the right person can do to keep things moving along.

What would you suggest to do if you're in that situation and you're not getting clarity, there isn't that person, it doesn't feel very obvious. What's the best practice? What are some tips and tricks there?

Well, I think that actually comes up a lot of the time when we're doing like an early kickoff before we've gotten to a discovery phase, right?

And this is different from our world of a proposal kickoff. So I'm kind of going off into a different type of creative project. But what I'm picking up on is where we realize, oh, who's going to need to make the decision?

Finding out who that decision maker is. Sometimes the simple thing is just identifying who that person is, because then you can follow up or you realize we need to get someone to sign off on this, or they will ultimately be the champion.

So that's how I see it happen most in our world, where we just start to understand like, oh, someone's not in the room here, that clearly now we have three decisions that need to be made.

We identify that person and all of a sudden we're able to bring them in for the rest of it, or at least know who to go to. So, you know, that's my experience. Melissa, anything to add or anything you've run into with that?

Well, I think there is a project management tool that might help with this, and it's a RACI matrix, which the R stands for responsible, who does the work, accountable is who signs off on it, consulted is the C, which is who provides input, and then

informed is just people who are kept updated. So that can be a framework as you're mapping out the work plan. And so, okay, who fills all these roles? And that can add a lot of clarity.

So that's one tool I've seen to help with that. Or maybe there's some things that aren't clear. We don't know if we have the right people in the room.

Maybe you've got a board of directors that just needs to be informed, and then you realize that you don't have the person who's supposed to be accountable to sign off on the work in the room. So that's a hot tip.

It's great. Thank you.

Yeah. It also, as you were saying that, Melissa, I realized when people know what their role is, then they can also back off a little bit when they're not needed.

A lot of leaders feel very responsible, and they really want to do everything they can for the win.

But if they don't need to do that part, other people are kind of filling in the missing data or whatever it is, then they can focus on the parts that they need to manage, which might be fee and team or some really, I don't know, very

specific details. That's nice to be clear on roles. Also allows us to focus on the people who have the big lift. Lauren Jane, I hear you say all the time, you're like, what kind of feedback are you looking for?

What kind of feedback would be helpful? Maybe that's something to have in your toolkit when you're in general, just having any type of medium. How deep do you want me to go?

I guess is what you're asking for. I don't know.

I've got levels.

Yeah. That is so helpful because if we're really far in the process and you're giving 100 critique points there, that can be overwhelming, could be deflating, you could be overriding decisions that were already made, right? Like that's not positive.

So it's very considerate of you to ask what we're looking for.

As a general note, I feel like project management and so much of what we've been talking about is seeking clarity.

Which was what I was just about to say.

I always appreciate that because either one, let me know I was not being very clear or we're making it crystal clear in case this is what I think I heard, like confirming, this is what you are looking for me to do.

It's always when I hear that, when I hear you say that, it's just a calming thing for me. I'm like, it's like, okay, this is all we need to do. This is what we're focused on.

So appreciate that. All right.

Well, let's pretend that we've gotten through the kickoff meeting, it was success and you blocked an hour afterwards to follow up with all your action items and send your links and you're doing all your best project management stuff to do.

Maybe we talk about how do you follow up effectively? How do you check in? What's the right cadence for checking in without feeling like you're micromanaging people?

I'm sure there's lots of ways we could go on that. But any thoughts on deciding what the right cadence is?

I think it's very dependent on the length of the project. That's my short answer.

That can mean weekly, bi-weekly. I'd say for most any project, you got to at least meet twice a month.

Right. I mean, monthly is like in the category of we have a monthly BD meeting, we have a monthly safety meeting, and there might be a project related to it, but it does feel like it's more of maintenance as opposed to a project, very tactical.

What about the short-term projects? I'm not on those as much as other people on the call are, so interviews, proposals, are you meeting every day?

We should be. For interview preps, I would say we need to meet pretty often.

It's rare that we have more than two weeks to prepare in my experience, and for the clients and projects that I'm working with, I mean, maybe three, but that short duration means every day progress needs to be happening, and there's a little bit of

accountability that comes with meeting regularly or every other day to keep things going. One of my favorite things to do, if I can get it to work with the team I'm working with, is to schedule the interview check-ins at the same time every time we

meet, because then we just know at two o'clock for the next two hours, we're talking interview prep, right? We just know what it's going to be. It doesn't come out of the blue.

You don't have a late meeting one day and then an early meeting, the next day, and you had no time to even do your homework you were working on. But that's in a perfect world. Something that I've seen work really well.

Well, and sometimes those meetings become the place that person can do the work.

It's just creating space on their calendar that they have that focused time. That's a tactic we use. Sometimes we maybe have the weekly meeting and then we see that nothing is happening.

We're going to set up a second meeting later this week where we're going to ask you all these questions and we're going to hear what your answers are and help you write this content so that you have a dedicated space, we can look at it together and

I would say the same goes for longer form projects, longer form creative projects as well.

Some people's style is to go away and do the work, and some people really need the structure of doing the work in the call with the team.

It can be very productive to get those details and tap that out in in real time. But it's nice that if you could communicate during the kickoff and really understand, what are we dealing with here?

Obviously, as you know your own team, you probably actually can read that or already have that idea. This special projects group needs to work this way. This group works a different way even internally and match up something, sync up.

We have a couple of clients that work in the tech sector, and so they like to use all the tech terms. I'm not in tech, so I don't really know them, but I know them from reading books like Scrum.

They're like, we're going to meet for 15 minutes every day until this proposal is done or whatever. And that works.

It's not the way Middle of Six normally works, but because it works so well for them and they're used to that with their team, we could just jump right in.

And honestly, meeting for 15 minutes on a proposal every day until it's due is quite effective. We don't do that. Yeah, we haven't moved that over to the rest of our work.

I think that could be really challenging given the number of proposals we're working on. But for these couple of clients, like, oh, yeah, we just knock that out. So, no, no, no, fun to experiment.

And our team has a daily huddle.

So often if you have an active pursuit or project going, there's a couple of minutes where we chat about all the projects that we work on.

Yeah.

Maybe we're already doing it.

Look at that. Well, thanks for talking through. It was kind of a trick question.

What's the right cadence to meet for a project? Because I knew the answer was, well, it depends on the project and it depends on the team. But at least we got to talk through a few of the things that we think work pretty well.

All right.

So, any other tips? Like, gosh, where do we go from here?

Well, for me, like we've talked about, we've created a plan, we have action items, we have due date. So how do you get the work done? And one thing that we've been leaning on a lot in our team is blocking time on our calendars.

So you just, okay, this two-hour block, I am working on this. And this next day at this two-hour block, I'm working on that. So that's one strategy.

I can say you can't just keep snoozing the reminder that comes up because then it doesn't happen, but it is a good strategy.

And then what it also does is it visually shows it to you and it prevents you from scheduling another meeting or at least thinking twice before you schedule another meeting in that block. Because there are only so many hours in the day.

And if they are all meetings, then you don't have time to do the work.

Yeah, the blocking a few hours or if you realize you're like, I need to work six hours, eight hours on this this week, whatever. If you have an idea, sometimes we don't have an idea.

But if you think that you have to spend six hours working on a component of something, that's a big chunk of time on your calendar and it is very helpful to see that.

And it may not all happen at once, but if you miss the first two-hour block, where's that going to go? It's got to go somewhere else or you have to, I think it's very helpful to have that big visual.

Let's see, what other things do we do to keep the team moving forward? Because if we're not meeting with them regularly, they can stall out.

Lauren Jane, anything you use to follow up from your action items or how do you nudge people without being annoying?

Well, we already talked about one of our tools, which is to seek decision-making in the meeting.

Again, depending on the style of the client, the work style, the dynamic of the team, sometimes that can't happen in the meeting, but whenever possible, I do, I start the meeting and I say, great, here's the decisions that we need made today during

the call. I just tell everyone, we're going to make this decision. Of course, you read the room, but it's like power of positive thinking, we're going to make this decision during the call.

So then, typically, we get to this crux and there's this pause, this moment of the team being like, well, I don't know, like, what's our decision? And typically, I say, so what I'm hearing is this, this is the direction we should move in.

I'm not hearing any opposition for this other direction. Do we all agree? And I'm actually like facilitating the decision making, which sounds a little silly, but some groups need that.

I love it when you do that.

Keep doing that.

Yeah, I do that a lot.

So that is a tip. It's not post the meeting, right? But that's a tip for during the call.

And post meeting, sending notes, notes and reminders. But that's not anything revelatory.

Again, when you have the time and the space and you have someone's attention captured, like that is truly the best, the best time to catch up on things, to ask, okay, when are you going to get that to me by? Right?

It's like, I have your attention and then you just, I let you loose in the wild between the calls. So I do, it's not, wasn't the greatest answer to what you're asking, but I do try to get most of that work done in decision-making in the meeting.

Well, I think it's a good, a really good answer because I was asking like, how do you follow up and get what you need without being annoying and you're like, I'm not following up, I'm just making that happen right now, right?

So you aren't kind of pestering people. And then for anyone else who's on the decision side of things, which we all are at times.

I mean, even for myself, often I'll be looking at my email or to kind of going through the lists, multiple tasks and things. And I am trying to decide, just decide. I actually probably know what needs to happen.

Just make the call. It goes both ways, right? Whether you're facilitating as the project manager, or if you're being supported by that project manager, make the decision.

It's probably going to be right. And worry about or rehash or fuss over the details that matter. And your project manager will probably point in the right direction.

Like, this doesn't really matter. You know, let's make the call and move on, so we don't have to spin our wheels.

I have also started being very clear about if we don't get a decision today, the deadline will move or we will not make our deadline. And being very clear about that. And I deliver it in a very sweet way, but a very clear way.

If we can't come to consensus today, your project will be affected. I need you guys to know that.

Because also sometimes people, even if it feels obvious, sometimes people are so wrapped up in the work that they're doing that they actually can't see that their lack of decision-making in the meeting is really affecting the outcome of the project.

And when the deadline can't move because it's a proposal that's due at 2 o'clock, I just want to say that for all the designers and proofreaders and people who are printing and binding, whatever that last stage is, not making decisions early is

compromising the quality of the proposal, the cool elements that could be done, but only when the content is in there and potentially the delivery of it. So we've said that one million times on this podcast, but I'll say it again, let's not sacrifice

Oh, those dang org charts.

Right now.

Oh, we just used the 45 minutes of the one hour meeting to talk about the org chart.

We can have a whole other podcast episode about facilitating those.

Or maybe we also can just issue a kit of org charts. Like, here are all the options and there's only two that are really good. So you might as well just go with those.

Just pick one of them.

Exactly.

Well, I think patience, like understanding where people are coming from, those are also good skills to have as a project manager. And we may be a little bit like flippant or whatever on the podcast.

We might enjoy kind of rousing our team members, you know, because we're all a little bit wild cards out there, right? We can all bring some behaviors, some avoidance behavior, or just kind of like things that are disruptive to the process.

But we mean it with kindness because it's like, hey, we're all dealing with this.

We all can be challenging, you know, in a work environment or being, you know, as we're kind of stressed out, but a good project manager will bring patience and clear communication and follow up because that is actually, at the end of the day, how it

gets done. So hopefully, that's kind of like a bit of takeaway from these things that we've kind of rolled through kind of under the umbrella of a proposal or interview or kind of other big creative project.

Before we wrap up, Melissa and Lauren Jane, is there anything else that you had on your mind related to PMing?

You just, you know, didn't fit in somewhere else or something that might be a little bit more from the creative agency side that could be relevant?

We didn't talk about scope and budget at all. And I know that that wasn't the only thing that we needed to talk about today, but I don't want to miss that.

Really the same principles that we've been talking about this entire call apply to scope and budget communications, which is, you know, how do you manage the scope creep without making it potentially awkward or damaging or feeling stressful?

Like, hey, we're really butting up against ours. Like, how do you do that? And the best thing is to stay in front of it, to be very transparent, right?

So if you're having weekly calls towards the beginning, it's, I don't think it's quite as necessary. But once you're reaching that, like, 50% scope mark, paying attention, cluing in the team, it doesn't necessarily have to be done in the meeting.

It could be an email to whoever's the PM on their side or the PIC on their side, but being very clear and also using your best judgment as a project manager when requests come in to take a quick scan.

Is that what was part of the scope or, hmm, that might push the timing, right? Like, that might push the timing out. We may not meet our deadlines or we may not be able to submit if we change the scope this much of the project.

So that's something I wanted to touch on is communication around budget.

Yeah, project managers have to practice that. It feels like it's a muscle that gets strengthened over time, practicing, communicating, and not feeling like this is a really super personal thing. I think finances can feel personal.

But when it comes to business, we're just trying to do right by what was agreed to and be respectful of whoever's time or money or whatever the resources that you're budgeting, right?

If you're working on an awards medal and the team has just gone off the rails with all of the things, it can be great, but also that is taking time from something else you may be required to do or whatever it looks like.

So getting comfortable, talking budget and schedule, and feeling comfortable that your advice matters in that way, and it's worthwhile, it feels like that's a good thing to practice up.

Back to Melissa's point about being a good PM can really help your career overall. Small skills to grow over time. Well, good suggestion, Lauren Jane.

Thank you for bringing that piece up too. Hopefully, this conversation gave people some ideas of things that they could do.

A couple of tips here or there, what they could do to manage their projects well and kind of reduce some frustration or just communicate better for their team and ultimately, you know, succeed in your career because being a strong project manager is

incredible, right? We've got a lot of those on our team and we see it and we see like the satisfaction in a job really well done and that comes to organization and communication. So thank you so much for sharing. We'll see you on the next one.

Thanks.

See you guys.

See ya.

The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six. Our producer is Kyle Davis, with digital marketing support by the team at Middle of Six. If you're looking for past episodes or more info, check out our podcast page at middleofsix.com/theshortlist.

You can follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at Middle of Six. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep on hustling.

The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.