Digital Project Management Training for Agencies with Ben Aston
Key Takeaways
- Ben moved from account management into project management by accident and with no training. He calls it his baptism by fire
- Account managers want to say yes and figure it out later. Project managers have to talk to the team first and offer options inside budget and timeline
- On tools, the honest answer is 'it depends.' 20 tools would work. What matters is fit with your process and buy-in from every department
- Write down the 10 steps of how a project gets from A to B before you worry about whether to call it agile or waterfall
- Agency owners should learn project management first, then either hire an experienced agency PM or train someone from the team
- A couple-of-grand-a-month retainer doesn't need a dedicated PM, but someone has to own the hours and report them weekly, or you'll over-service every client
Gray MacKenzie hosts Ben Aston, founder of The Digital Project Manager, which in 2019 drew about 300,000 visitors a month and had 30,000 email subscribers. Ben spent 15 years as an agency PM in London, Vancouver, and the US before focusing on DPM, its school, and its membership. They cover account management versus project management, tool selection, process, hiring your first PM, and small retainers.
Account managers say yes; project managers have to say no
Ben started on the Stella Artois account in London, a summer internship he lost after answering that, outside advertising, he’d want to be in a boy band. He moved to a digital agency as an account manager and slid into project management. He was told the producer role was the same as account management. It wasn’t. He was suddenly expected to produce timelines, estimates, statements of work, and project plans with no training: his “baptism by fire.” One person can do both, Ben said, if trained, but the two mindsets fight.
The reality is, with project management, we have to say no to the client sometimes. You can’t have that, but this is what you can have. Whereas an account manager would just want to say, of course you can have that. I don’t need to talk to the team first… We’re used to saying yes and then figuring it out later, whereas the project manager in us needs to think, okay, let me talk to the team first and let’s work out some options that are viable within your budget, within the timeline that we’ve got.
”What tool should we use?” The honest answer is it depends
Gray raised the question every agency asks (ZenPilot built its own PM software before realizing the tool wasn’t the root problem). Ben hears it in every DPM School cohort.
Everybody hates the answer, “Well, it depends,” and you could probably use 20 different tools and they probably work just as well for you… It’s not really about the tool, because the maturity of project management tools now is such that there is a lot of parity between tools… More fundamentally, we’ve got to think about how that all aligns with our process and the way that we like to work. It’s got to be a tool that’s accepted through the departments.
His example: the agency defaults to Jira because the tech lead picked it, then nobody in strategy, UX, or design will use it. Get the whole agency bought in, and test-drive a tool on a few project types before committing. (DPM itself runs on Trello.)
Write down how you get from A to B before you call it agile
Asked how he walks an agency through fixing its PM, Ben starts with the whole lifecycle, from a project coming in through delivery.
Let’s just write this down. What are the 10 steps at a high level?… And I think sometimes people get kind of lost in thinking, well, is this agile, is this waterfall, what is this? And they want to put a name on their process of how they get from A to B. But it really is just how you get from A to B.
From there DPM School looks for where to add agility: run steps in parallel, front-load work, ship something earlier so the client sees value. Agile themes, Ben said, without adopting Scrum, which he thinks is great for software and a bad default for agencies. His warning was about selling agile.
In a biz dev or sales environment, it can be tempting to sell an agile approach through to a client… But actually the client’s expecting something for their money. A client at the end of the four sprints and 100k that the client has spent, they’re expecting a website, because that’s what you’ve talked about at the beginning. It doesn’t matter that you described the process as agile. We’ve got to manage their expectations.
When to hire a PM, and what small retainers still need
Gray put the question a five-to-eight person agency owner has: for the first time, I don’t know what’s happening on every project. Learn PM first, hire someone, or move someone over? Step one is the owner learning project management regardless; plenty of owners take DPM School just to speak the same language as PMs and clients. Then two options, both of which work: hire an experienced agency PM who arrives with ideas on what they’ve seen work, or send someone from the team through the course and let them define the process with the founder. What follows, in Ben’s experience: better estimates, resourcing planned so people stop working weekends, and profitability visible per project and per phase instead of one annual P&L.
Gray’s last objection: our retainers are $1,500 to $2,000 a month, there’s no margin for full-scale project management. Ben wouldn’t prescribe a cutoff. His example was a performance marketing agency with modest fees and no dedicated PM, where the strategist owns the process and is accountable for hours allocated versus hours spent. You might not need a PM, but someone has to own the numbers.
If you’ve got a whole bunch of clients paying a couple of grand each month, what typically happens is that you over-service those clients… unless you’re keeping a really good eye on how much time you’re spending… But if you’re not creating weekly status reports and saying to the clients, okay, this week we spent eight hours, and in those eight hours we did x, y, and z, next week we’re going to spend four hours because we spent eight hours this week… managing their expectations around that is really important.
It boils down to leadership, Ben said: someone has to lead, and leadership has to define the process. His resources, including the seven-week DPM School course and the membership, are at thedigitalprojectmanager.com.