When you wash your hands every 30 seconds, they dry out, leaving a hurty mess of chapped skin in their wake. When your company processes a pandemic, it leaves a hurty mess of cancelled projects, haphazard handovers, and friction-filled calls in its wake. Find out where you stand compared to your industry peers. We’re gathering the numbers.
This spring, we’re looking past the white-hot panic of COVID-19 emergence and laying out the foundation for how resilient shops are running projects and adapting to uncertainty as 80% of the world remains shut down after two months of lockdowns.
Why should you care? Because now is the time to adjust your trajectory: shift your processes, tighten your project management, and reconnect with why you are in this business, to begin with. The teams that are focusing on these things now will be miles ahead of the rest as we emerge blinking and awestruck on the other side (whether it’s 6 months or 24 months from now). The pressure cooker we’re in magnifies all the issues and opportunities you had before. Can you see them? They’re crawling into your eyeballs and they need some love.
Take the 2020 Pattern Report Survey
Find out where you stand. We’ve teamed up with a sharp team of subject matter experts in disciplines like accounting, legal, operations, research, and the distributed workforce to uncover current insights and better practices for resilient digital shops. From growth strategies, to project management and cash management, to people management, billing strategies, and stress management. We will be tackling the hard stuff:
- How are digital firms doing right now?
- How much cash do they have?
- Are projects getting cancelled? Paused?
- How are owners dealing with change?
- What shape are the shops that thrive?
The questions keeping you up at night will be answered by participants and pulled together in our debut 2020 Pattern Report. We’re making it available, in full, to everyone who participates in the survey.
Participate and get the full report by taking the survey:
This survey closes on June 1st, 2020. We need your help to outline this weird future.
If you’re not an owner, pass this email onto one.
A note on privacy: All responses will be fully anonymous, and your contact information will be kept strictly confidential and used only for research purposes.
I’ve been thinking...
Your account managers (if you have them) need to know how to run projects. Conversely, your project managers need to know how to foster relationships. There isn’t enough time for the tension between these two parties: AMs fighting on behalf of clients and PMs fighting on behalf of the team and neither seeing eye to eye.
Not when every Zoom call drains their human batteries, and every missed communication becomes a missed opportunity to support a more valuable project or client. If you look around and see AMs that aren’t able to scope or PMs that are too bogged down in the weeds to recognize account opportunities, you’re witnessing up to 40% of their effort seep through the cracks. And that effort is too expensive to squander—those are your margins bleeding through the band-aid. That is your team’s magic dissolving into heartache.
We’ve trained nearly 100 apprentices, departments, and agencies all over the world. If you think it’s impossible for these roles to share one hat or these hats to share one body, you haven’t met our graduates. They have sales brains and nimble project management hearts and they mean business.
From the #bookshelf
The best links posted in Slack this week. Straight from our apprentices and their trainers:
How much should a credit union website cost? A creative way to price your clients by thinking about value in the same way they do.
The big challenge in business model development: How to systematically test your business model Which of the 55 different business models does your company run? If yours isn’t working, maybe it’s time to refine. This article by BMI Lab walks you through how to test your business model.
Scrumbook A simple but effective analog planning tool for Scrum by some local Vancouverites. Great for the Agile PMs in your life who just need some time to think and get it down on paper first.
New on Louder Than Ten
Isolated together
Nick Wilkinson talks project communication in the arctic—with NASA.
I cut my teeth as a project manager coordinating remote and isolated scientific research teams in the Canadian Arctic, and although that project wasn’t managed during a viral outbreak and near-total economic collapse, I’m seeing some similarities.
Friendly Design Co. Case Study
NEW! How Friendly Design turned their clients into lifelong fans, and how we helped.
The new RACI
How do you know who does what? You live by the RACI.
Remote training for project leads and their teams
Digital Project Management Foundations
Design better processes for your teams and projects with our 3-month remote trainer-led course. There has never been a better time to get your projects right. Class is in session starting June 18th.