Project Management: Bringing Behind-the-Scenes Value To Our Clients
When a project has lots of moving parts, it can be hard to keep team members on track. That’s why project management plays such an important role in the Kane Communications Group process. It’s a key part of any project’s success.
Visionary leaders need partners who can deliver when it matters most. Our public relations, marketing and communications clients from the Milwaukee-area and beyond come to us with their business problems. It’s our job to turn those challenges into strategic goals and help solve them in scope, on time and within budget.
Great project management not only means timelines, deadlines, and checking the boxes, but it unites our clients and our team to create a vision for success. When projects are managed properly, there’s a positive impact beyond the delivery of what’s promised in the communications plan guiding our team’s work.
Managing our client’s projects is important because it ensures what is being delivered is right and will deliver real value against the business opportunity.
So, why is project management so important for our clients’ projects?
Strategic Alignment — Our work starts with a business problem we’re trying to solve. We also want to know what success looks like. Building a strategic framework for what we’ve promised to our clients and monitoring how a project evolves ensures we meet the agreed-upon goals. Strategic alignment starts with the proposals our clients have agreed to. Project management supports every plan by making sure tactical efforts are delivered on time and look like what was promised.
Realistic and Proper Planning — There is nothing more important than having the right people do the right thing at the right time. Proper planning helps to clarify roles, anticipate risks, and creates a system to guarantee the project continually aligns with the overall strategy. Each client project and project team has a dedicated project manager and timelines to support these goals. In a video project, it’s important to have the right people involved before, during and after a video shoot. With so many different styles of shooting and storytelling, having the right people there means Kane can help our client’s vision and work come to life.
Quality Control — Dedicated project management makes sure a project not only has the time and resources but also that the output is quality tested at every stage. At Kane, we expect a thorough review of the work we send back to our clients, so we can be sure what’s being delivered consistently hits the mark. In a public and media relations project, our entire client team reviews media materials before they go back to the client for approval. It is important to make sure our team hears the same thing and our copywriting hits the mark. Something as small as a media advisory could make or break a client project if we aren’t telling the story right.
Continuous Oversight — When proper oversight and project reporting is in place, it helps us to see when a project is beginning to deviate from its intended path, and course-correct if needed. At Kane, we like to generate easily digestible status reports for our clients to provide insights into the work completed and planned, hours utilized, and how the project is tracking against milestones, risks, and dependencies. When we build brands for clients, from initial research to defining positioning and identity, we know how important each step of the way the project is. We keep our clients in the loop and involved throughout a project. We expect them to have high expectations for our work and we do our best to deliver.
Project Management Best Practices
An important thing to remember with project management is keeping the lines of communication open. Get as many details as you can upfront and don’t be afraid to ask questions to get the information you need. That helps set a project up for success and is key in hitting deadlines, whether it’s a public relations, marketing, branding, video production or internal communications project.
Project management is more than simply tracking deadlines and setting a budget. At Kane, our project teams ensure we deliver a real return on investment for our clients.
This article was written by Justyce Blankenship, former Marketing Advisor for Kane Communications Group.