Patti Epstein

How is dig­i­tal project man­age­ment dif­fer­ent from oth­er project man­age­ment areas? For a Dig­i­tal PM, our end game is prod­ucts, web­sites or apps that sup­port just about any orga­ni­za­tion. Now, I’m a Project Man­ag­er who under­stands dig­i­tal work­flows and best prac­tices. I didn’t always use the terms dis­cov­ery, project plan, wire­frames or CMS, but I man­aged teams and process­es that did those things. For 20 years, my job encom­passed a wide range of tech­ni­cal and artist craft­man­ship – from mak­ing Space Ghost car­toons to com­mer­cials for Dove Hair­care. From beta test­ing cam­eras and Motion Cap­ture sys­tems to inter­ac­tive designs for Microsoft. Cur­rent­ly, I work at CNN man­ag­ing design projects like ​“CNN Heroes,” Elec­tion Cov­er­age, or Ander­son Coop­er Full Cir­cle on Face­book Live. I’m always on call for Break­ing News – because some­one has to sup­port clients with incred­i­bly tight dead­lines. So whether you call me a PM or a DPM…there are nine prin­ci­ples that I learned to suc­cess­ful­ly dri­ve a project to com­ple­tion, secure the bud­get, and sus­tain a high­ly func­tion­al team.

1. Guide clients through a robust dis­cov­ery process to refine & define the project scope

2. Estab­lish and sup­port an envi­ron­ment where com­mu­ni­ca­tion is key and nev­er tak­en for granted

3. Make Project Plans dynam­ic to keep the team connected

4. Allo­cate enough time to ade­quate­ly focus on con­tent & design – it doesn’t cre­ate itself, and can make or break your brand

5. Be kind to devel­op­ers. They are not just ​“resources,” but tal­ent­ed peo­ple with lives and fam­i­lies, not machines

6. Don’t treat QA as a lux­u­ry; it’s a neces­si­ty that CAN­NOT be skimped on or rushed

7. Use SCRUM as a suc­cess­ful Agile frame­work, if and when, the whole team can sup­port it

8. Embrace bud­gets; They are not evil! They keep us hon­est and pro­vide a sol­id foun­da­tion for track­ing our progress

9. We, as projects man­agers, ARE the com­pass of the team. Imple­ment­ing sol­id PM prac­tices saves time and mon­ey and shapes organizations.

Hav­ing my team’s back and my clients’ bud­get means putting these core val­ues into play every day with every project. Whether I’m man­ag­ing a broad­cast design project or web inte­gra­tion — Loud­er Than Ten’s pro­gram has giv­en me skills to put them into prac­tice and the con­fi­dence to know they make a difference.